


all this that is more than a wish is a memory

by 100indecisions



Series: Loki fic [22]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dehumanization, Fantastic Racism, Gen, Hurt Loki, Hurt/Comfort, Loki Angst, Loki Feels, Loki Has Issues, M/M, Medical Experimentation, Mental Health Issues, Mind Control, Not Canon Compliant, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Slash, Steve Angst, Steve Has Issues, Steve Rogers as the Winter Soldier, Suicidal Thoughts, Telepathy, Torture, Vivisection, eventually sort of, for anything past the end of Thor or a certain point in Captain America, mentions of various other characters as they become relevant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-04
Updated: 2015-11-17
Packaged: 2018-04-25 00:36:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 26,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4939918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/100indecisions/pseuds/100indecisions
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Using what little information he overheard during his captivity with HYDRA, Loki convinced the asset to help him escape in exchange for more knowledge about who he used to be. This is what happens next. </p><p>(Or, a continuation of the AU where Steve is the Winter Soldier and Loki’s a HYDRA guinea pig, and things are generally awful.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is a direct sequel to [let me see you stripped down to the bone](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4179450/chapters/9437451), and by “direct” I mean it picks up maybe 15 minutes after that one ended, because originally they were both supposed to be part of the same fic. If you haven’t read the first one, please do that now (it’s shorter than this fic), or this one won’t make much sense. This fic is also 1) my first time doing [Marvel Big Bang](http://marvel-bang.livejournal.com), which was fun, so I’ll definitely do it again and 2) the longest thing I’ve ever finished. I know 26,000 words isn’t a lot compared to many writers’ word counts, but it’s exciting for me! 
> 
> Speaking of which: this story is finished, all the other chapters currently sitting in drafts waiting to be posted, which I'll probably do over the course of a week or two. So, no long waits between chapters here! 
> 
> Many thanks to [lizardbeth](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Lizardbeth), who kindly beta-read this for me. If something sticks out as repetitive or kind of boring, it’s probably because I didn’t want to cut something she suggested cutting…so that part’s my fault. Also, because it’s Marvel Big Bang, this story has [accompanying art](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5110214) by [stormbrite](http://archiveofourown.org/users/stormbrite), illustrating several scenes! It’s really cool, go check it out. Also also, [neurovicky](http://archiveofourown.org/users/neurovicky) made some [fanart](http://thelightofthingshopedfor.tumblr.com/post/130788821482/neurovicky-inktober-6-7-winter-soldier) for the first fic for Inktober, which applies for pretty much the entire first chapter of this fic.
> 
> Final note: the title is from “[Ending Start](http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/metric/endingstart.html)” by Metric. Go read the lyrics, the whole thing’s pretty relevant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Chapter-specific warnings:** a little violence, tiny bit of ableist language, description of injuries, mention of starvation/disordered eating (I don’t know that “disordered eating” is the appropriate term for someone recovering from being starved, but it’s close enough I figured I should warn for it), tiny bit of nonsexual nudity

There’s very little traffic this late, and when Rogers turns down a narrow, dimly lit alley between two buildings, he’s confident no one on the street will see them. He crouches and lowers Loki to the pavement, leaning him against the wall, and Loki blinks up at him. “Tired already?”

“No,” Rogers says, which is true, but the vague thought intrudes that it’s never been relevant before if he got tired on a mission. “I got you out. Your turn.”

“Ah,” Loki says. “That. Well, I suppose now is as good a time as any to tell you. You recall I said, or at any rate heavily implied, that I knew who you used to be?”

Rogers tenses. “Yes.”

Loki leans his head back against the wall, wincing. “I lied to you.”

Rogers drops to one knee and clamps his hand around Loki’s throat, not choking him but squeezing enough to threaten. Loki doesn’t move, just looks at him, and Rogers feels a dull anger stir behind his breastbone. “Why,” he says.

Loki makes an impatient noise that vibrates slightly against Rogers’ palm. He doesn’t seem at all bothered by the hand on his neck that could cut off his air or snap his spine at any moment. “I know they tampered extensively with your brain, but they didn’t make you slow-witted, did they? Why do you _think_ I lied? Because I had to get out of that chamber, I could not do it alone, and you were the only one who seemed even slightly inclined to help me.”

“So you decided to use me too,” Rogers says.

“Yes, I did,” Loki says. “What are you going to do about that, soldier?”

Rogers tightens his grip and feels Loki start to struggle for air, but he still makes no move to get away, and somehow that’s even more frustrating. “I could take you back.”

“You could try,” Loki agrees breathlessly. “But you will not, because you know they will wipe your mind again if you do—and now that I am not bolted to a table being pumped full of poison, I am at least capable of forcing you to kill me instead. So those are your choices: you may kill me for my lies however you like, and I will take comfort in the fact that you are certain to do so at least more efficiently than my other captors might. And then you may do what you wish—return to your masters, leave them and make your own way, it will be no concern of mine.”

“You said choices,” Rogers says. “What’s the other one?”

Loki makes an abortive movement that might have been a shrug, if he weren’t pinned to the wall by a hand on his throat. “You can leave me alive, help me heal, and see whether I can perhaps make some truth out of my lie after all. Though you should not—heh—hold your breath. I am known far more for lying than for truth-telling.”

Rogers squeezes harder out of sheer frustration and feels a pulse of vicious satisfaction when Loki starts to choke in his grip, back arching and heartbeat fluttering unsteadily under his fingers. “I could choke you out and drag you back unconscious. You couldn’t stop me then.”

“They’ll still wipe you,” Loki gasps out. “I will…take my chances.”

Rogers growls at him, almost wants to carry through on the threat out of pure stubbornness, because Loki doesn’t _know_ him, has no business acting like he does, and Rogers has always hated being played like a sucker, and the last thing he wants is—

_Wait, what?_

He wants. The realization stops him cold. The asset does not want; he follows orders. He has no desires, only targets and objectives. But Rogers wants. Already, thanks in part to Loki, he wants, and he recognizes that he wants, and—

And he _wants_ to stay that way.

Abruptly he lets go, and Loki sags back against the wall, coughing hard. Rogers sits back on his heels, realizing that he _is_ tired now, and it’s not physical—it’s something new and he doesn’t know what to make of it. “So you don’t know me at all,” he says.

“Why would I?” Loki says hoarsely, and coughs again. “I’m not even from your primitive little realm.”

“You knew my name,” Rogers points out.

Loki shakes his head. “Educated guess. People talk when they don’t think you’re listening—and when you’re just an interesting test subject, they assume you are not listening.” His gaze on Rogers sharpens. “You may not remember, but I suspect you’ve experienced that yourself.”

Something else clicks into place. “They tried to make you like me, didn’t they? But it didn’t take, so you’ve just been a lab rat ever since.”

Loki grimaces. “That is one way to put it, I suppose.”

Rogers sighs. Loki leans his head back again and lets his eyes fall shut, apparently not planning to contribute anything else to the conversation, so Rogers considers his options for a moment and then picks Loki up again. Loki makes a thin sound, half startled and half pained. “What…?”

“I’m going with option two,” Rogers says and heads back out to the street. Loki doesn’t reply, but he doesn’t relax, either; if anything he seems to grow more tense.

Rogers sticks to the shadows again and walks until he finds a truck parked at the curb that looks old enough not to have a built-in alarm system. He can deal with those, but he prefers to keep things simple when he can, and he doesn’t need anything fancy anyway. (He prefers—how does he know that? But it feels true, not just a quality the Winter Soldier is supposed to have so he carries out his missions more efficiently.) It’s the work of only a few moments to break into the truck and hotwire it—and his thoughts pause on that too, as he works, and he wonders whether this skill comes from HYDRA or from whatever he was before—and then he settles Loki in the passenger seat and gets behind the wheel himself. Loki watches the whole process without much interest, slumping in the seat, hands loose in his lap. The bandages around his wrists are nearly soaked through with blood, although at least what Rogers can see on the top layer looks dry, so the bleeding has either slowed or stopped entirely.

“You should buckle up,” Rogers says as he pulls away from the curb.

Loki glances at the seatbelt Rogers is wearing, and his expression tightens. “I think not.”

“Getting pulled over by cops would be bad too, you know,” Rogers says, “and for something that stupid? Not wearing a seatbelt is illegal,” he adds, realizing there’s no reason for Loki to know anything about US traffic laws.

“Then you’ll just have to drive carefully, because I am not strapping myself down to anything,” Loki says sharply. “Particularly not like—that.”

Rogers glances down at his own seatbelt, then across at Loki. The chest strap would press against his ravaged torso, true, although the sudden quivering tension in Loki’s body—the hunted, _trapped_ look in his eyes—suggests that’s not the main reason he’s refusing. Rogers considers saying that knocking Loki out is still an option, and for that matter he doesn’t think Loki could do much to fight him off if he just buckled him in. But that all sounds like more trouble than it’s worth, especially when he has no intention of getting pulled over anyway.

“Suit yourself,” he says instead, returning his attention to the road. Loki flashes him a startled glance, so quick Rogers almost misses it, before turning his head toward the window.

They drive in silence for a while, Loki hunched in on himself, eyes closed. Rogers would almost think he’s sleeping, except he’s holding himself too stiffly. Every time they go over a bump he makes a quiet noise of pain, often no more than a sharp exhalation of breath, but otherwise he’s silent.

Gradually the buildings get shorter and less grandiose until Rogers finds what he’s looking for: a Walmart store, closed for the night. It’s right on the street like all the little shops around it instead of being set back behind its own parking lot, which is potentially a good thing for staying hidden. Loki opens his eyes and glances listlessly out the window as Rogers circles to the building’s other side. It has a couple service entrances that look promising, as well as an underground parking garage. Rogers considers that for a moment—getting them off the street for this would be good, but if they need to leave quickly, he doesn’t want to end up trapped. Instead he pulls over at the curb, kills the engine, and opens his door. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he says. Loki jerks upright, eyes widening, and Rogers shuts the door on his hoarse “ _Wait_ —”

Loki fumbles with his door for several seconds, finally getting it open as Rogers rounds the front of the truck, and he nearly falls out in his haste. Rogers stops, watching him, and Loki clings to his still-unbuckled seatbelt, expression almost as wild and desperate as it was in the HYDRA lab. “Don’t—don’t leave me.”

“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Rogers repeats, and Loki shakes his head frantically.

“No, what if—they might _come_ , while you’re in there, I can’t fight them, if they find me they’ll take me _back_ —”

“We weren’t followed,” Rogers says. “There’s nobody around, and I need to get some supplies. You’ll just slow me down.”

“No,” Loki says, “no, I—I can…try to shield you again—”

“I thought you used up your magic.”

Loki licks his lips, and for a moment his mouth works as if he’s searching for words before he slumps against the seat, head bowed. Blood trickles lazily down his arm from his wrist. “Please,” he says, his voice low and hopeless. “Please, just…don’t leave me.”

Rogers studies him for a moment. There is no practical justification for taking Loki into Walmart with him, and a lot of practical justifications for making him stay in the truck (possibly, again, by rendering him unconscious). He’s almost definitely going to get blood on something, he really will slow Rogers down, and the best he can probably do at this point is short out a security camera or two. But—yes, if HYDRA shows up, they’ll take Loki, and Rogers won’t have any warning before they come for him too.

And the same persistent _something_ that nudged him onto this path in the first place, that wanted to help a dark-haired man on a table in a HYDRA lab, is nudging at him again with a confusing mix of _he’s scared, he shouldn’t be scared_ and _we don’t leave a man behind_. Which is ridiculous and not really true, because Rogers is reasonably sure he’s left people behind before, but—the mission was always what mattered, and thinking about things like leaving people behind didn’t come into it.

This isn’t a mission. And there is some deeply buried, impractical, and insistent part of Rogers only now making itself known that doesn’t _want_ to leave a scared, injured, and virtually helpless companion behind.

“Okay,” he says. “What if I take you inside and you stay by the entrance while I work?”

Loki raises his head, expression wavering between hope and wariness. “Inside the building,” he says. “Will you leave me a weapon?”

“Sure,” Rogers says. He can spare one of his knives for a few minutes.

“Yes,” Loki says. “All right. I…thank you.” He still looks like he expects Rogers to slam the door on him at any second, but Rogers doesn’t intend to change his mind, so Loki’s concerns on that subject are irrelevant.

“Just try not to bleed on anything,” he says as he picks Loki up again and leans on the door to close it. “They’ve got plenty of your DNA to track already.”

Loki pulls his arms in, trying to keep any fresh blood on the hospital gown. “I am well aware.”

Rogers crosses the street with Loki in his arms, still hugging the shadows, and sets Loki down at the nearest door. “Did you have anything left for that invisibility trick you did earlier, or not?”

“At the moment? Perhaps one minute of it.”

“That would help,” Rogers says and gets to work, dismantling the door’s alarm and lock. He’s taken apart vastly more complicated systems before (hasn’t he? He’s certain he has, but he can’t remember anything specific), so it doesn’t take long. Just as Loki says “Hurry,” his voice strained, Rogers pops the door open. Beyond is one of the store’s back rooms, dimly lit and full of untagged merchandise. To the left is a hallway that looks more office than warehouse, which is what he wants.

Rogers hauls Loki inside and shuts the door behind them, then finds a nearby spot next to a plastic-wrapped pallet where Loki will be partially hidden from sight but will still be able to see anyone coming. Loki winces as he settles on the cold concrete floor, winces again as he accepts the small, matte-black knife Rogers offers him. As far as Rogers can tell, only the boxes at Loki’s back and side are holding him upright, but he has the knife and he doesn’t make any further protest, so Rogers turns his attention to the task ahead. He considers finding the security office and incapacitating whoever’s on duty there, but keeping a low profile is probably best. Instead he puts on a pair of gloves, leaves the back area, and works his way through the store methodically and efficiently, only taking things he’s sure they’ll need—some prepackaged food, a heavy-duty first aid kit, extra bandages and disinfectant, ammo. A laptop still in its box. A few shirts, two pairs of jeans, one pair of loose jogging pants, and a pack each of socks and underwear. Basic toiletries. A wheelchair. Everything goes into two sturdy backpacks, which he places on the seat of the wheelchair. He easily avoids the cameras and security guards (and chooses, for the moment, not to question how he knows how to do this). Last of all, he finds a safe in one of the back offices and removes a few handfuls of bills.

Loki hasn’t moved when Rogers gets back to him, except to make the knife disappear somewhere (for the time being, Rogers decides not to ask for it back). A little of the tripwire tension leaves his posture when he sees Rogers, and then his eyebrows draw together. “What is _that_?”

“Wheelchair.” Rogers stops in front of Loki, swings one of the backpacks onto his shoulders, and sets the other one on the floor.

“Those are for…cripples,” Loki says. His tone doesn’t make it a question, but it seems to be anyway.

Rogers shrugs. “Lot easier than carrying you everywhere, and a whole lot less likely to attract attention.”

Loki exhales, looks away, and says nothing, which Rogers figures is close enough to agreement. He gets Loki into the chair and everything to the truck without incident, and the rest of the drive passes in silence. DC proper was quiet enough this late at night; the further out they get, the fewer vehicles he sees, until they’re the only movement on the tree-lined streets of a residential area.

Loki twitches when the truck stops in front of an apartment building, seeming to wake from an uneasy half-doze, and glances around. “Where are we?”

“Bethesda,” Rogers says. “Maryland. Not very far from the center of DC but far enough for now. I have a safehouse here.”

Loki accepts this silently and reaches for the door, wincing—and then hunches over with a gasp when he tries to pull on the handle. His wrists don’t look any worse than they did earlier, but that doesn’t mean much considering how much damage there was, and now that Rogers is looking he can see at least two fingers that look broken. Panicked adrenaline had pushed Loki through the pain earlier, apparently; without it he can’t seem to do much with his hands. And with the adrenaline, something else seems to have disappeared: the tiny amount of defiance he showed in the lab when he tricked Rogers, and again when he revealed the lie. Now he just looks emaciated and exhausted again, and somehow small despite his height.

Rogers notes these things, the way he assesses everything, but he doesn’t know what to do with the information, how to classify it. He doesn’t know what he feels about it either (which brings him up short again, like the realization that he wanted something). It’s curiosity, but not just that. Not quite concern, either.

He leaves the truck, hauls the wheelchair out of the back, and pushes it over to the passenger side. Loki is still trying to work the handle, his expression tight with pain and an odd, muted sort of anger. Rogers doesn’t know what to do with that either, so he just opens the door and picks Loki up again, then settles him in the wheelchair.

The building is new enough to have an elevator, fortunately, although it’s a creaky older one, and something of a tight fit with the wheelchair. But the place is quiet and safe (and air-conditioned in the actual apartments, which isn’t as crucial this late in the year but still probably important for an alien who apparently comes from a cold place), and his key is where it’s supposed to be, under a trick panel in the floor below one of the wall-mounted fire extinguishers. The apartment itself is a basic one-bedroom, and Rogers sweeps his gaze over it as he enters and flicks the lights on. Everything looks clear, no signs of disturbance or listening devices, and the curtains are still closed. He’s familiar with this place, but he automatically catalogs everything anyway: bathroom and bedroom to the left, kitchen immediately after the short entry hallway and its closet, a bar separating the kitchen from the living room (good visibility, decent cover if necessary). There’s a couch, a stuffed chair, a side table with a sturdy-looking metal lamp, no TV or decorations. On the living room’s back wall is a sliding-glass door that leads to a small balcony, the orange glow of streetlights showing through gaps in the curtains. That’s the only other exit, both a potential vulnerability and a possible escape route—probably not for Loki, even though they’re only five floors up, but Rogers knows he can use the balconies to work his way down.

He locks the door behind them and wheels Loki into the living room. He takes one of the backpacks with him into the kitchen and unloads the few perishables he grabbed into the fridge, then looks over the bar at Loki. “If you eat something, will you throw up?”

Loki raises his head slowly from where he was apparently contemplating his chair’s oversized wheels. “I…do not know.”

“Well, try this,” Rogers says, coming over with a little single-serving box of milk. Loki looks at the box, then back up at Rogers, his cracked lips parted in confusion. Rogers opens the straw and sticks it in the box, then holds it out again. After a moment Loki takes it carefully, balancing it on the wheelchair’s arm so he can hold it in place without having to grasp it, but he still looks faintly perplexed—by the gesture, Rogers thinks, not by the way the milk is packaged.

Rogers goes back into the kitchen and puts away the rest of the food, of which there isn’t much; he’ll have to find a CVS or something tomorrow. For now he settles for some granola bars and studies Loki as he eats. The alien has finished the milk box and let it fall to his lap, and now he’s just sitting there again and looking at his hands, his face mostly veiled by his hair.

“I should probably set those breaks,” Rogers says after a moment.

Loki flinches, and when he glances up, his expression looks not just distant or distracted but utterly lost. “What?”

“Your fractures,” Rogers says. “Just make sure they’re set so you heal right. You heal fast enough they could get messed up pretty quick, and you probably don’t want to have to rebreak anything later.”

Loki blanches. “No. No, I very much—” He frowns. “How do you know about my healing?”

“Read your file. Skimmed it, anyway.”

“My—” His mouth snaps shut as he gets it, blood rushing to his face, and he drops his gaze back to his hands, not quite fast enough to hide the sudden intense shame in his expression. All he says, though, is “I see.”

“So,” Rogers says.

Loki nods jerkily. “I suppose—fingers, and…I don’t know how many places in my legs. I think my left knee may be out of joint. Anything else is…just cracked, I believe.”

“Okay,” Rogers says, coming around the bar to open the second backpack. “And no stitches, probably.”

Loki grimaces. “No. But fresh bandages would not go awry, if you have them.”

“Got some of pretty much everything,” Rogers says. He pulls the wheelchair over to the couch and locks it in place before dumping the medical supplies out of the backpack, then looks critically at the bloody bandages showing through the hospital gown. “These open wounds should all really be cleaned properly.”

Loki’s fingers twitch. “Surely they will keep until morning. I need…more than anything, I need _rest_.”

Rogers considers the healing speeds recorded in Loki’s file and shrugs. “Probably. I should still rewrap these for now. Definitely set the breaks.” Loki nods again, reluctantly, and Rogers asks, “You gonna fight me?”

“I will endeavor to keep still,” Loki replies tightly, and if he’s going for sarcasm, he doesn’t quite make it.

Rogers shrugs and gets to work. Loki stays mostly quiet for the broken fingers, although his breathing is strained until Rogers finishes wrapping them. He checks everything else pretty thoroughly, Loki holding himself rigid in his efforts not to flinch away from Rogers’ probing fingers. Pulling the hospital gown off to reveal Loki’s chest is easy enough, even though it’s stiff with blood in places. Removing the bandages is a lot more difficult once he gets down to the layers actually touching Loki’s skin, and eventually Rogers resorts to warm water and a pair of scissors that makes Loki’s jaw go tight in reaction. The autopsy-like incisions in his torso look nearly as bad as they did in the lab, now heavily clotted with dark blood, but at least the skin doesn’t seem to be in immediate danger of detaching again. Under the dried blood and bruising, Loki’s ribs stand out sharply. A couple of them are visibly out of alignment and have to be nudged back into place; the first makes Loki stop breathing entirely for a few seconds, and then he goes so tense trying not to move that he starts shaking.

Rogers thinks maybe he should say something reassuring here, but he has no idea what (reassurance, after all, is not part of the asset’s skill set), so he says nothing and begins cleaning up some of the blood in preparation for rewrapping Loki’s chest. When he comes to the actual bandages, he pauses, remembering the sight of the organs inside Loki’s chest and what the records said about the internal damage inflicted. “What about under—?”

“ _Leave it_ ,” Loki snaps. “I _will not_ —” He takes a hitching breath that probably isn’t deep enough to do much good and says more moderately, “Unless you are a surgeon as well as a soldier, there is nothing you can do to improve the situation anyway. My body will repair itself eventually.”

Rogers shrugs and tapes the beginning of the bandage in place on Loki’s sunken abdomen. His skin is slightly less clammy than it was earlier, but probably still not normal, and Loki twitches at his touch. “How bad is it right now?”

Loki is silent for a moment as Rogers begins to wind the bandage around his torso. “It’s…difficult to say,” he says finally. “I think—part of one lung—the right, I believe—and…certainly part of my liver is missing. They removed a kidney and a great deal of intestinal tract at some point, but…I am not sure how long ago that was, or how much might have regrown since then.”

“Intestinal tract,” Rogers repeats as he tapes the last part of the bandage in place under the sharp jut of Loki’s shoulder blade. “And it was always just IV, right? No actual food?” Loki nods. “Guess we’ll find out soon how your other bodily functions are doing, then. You realize if you’ve got a perforated bowel anywhere, anything you eat or drink is gonna spill into your abdominal cavity and cause even more problems, right?”

Loki shrugs, not looking terribly bothered by the possibility. “Apparently my body is fairly resistant to most common Midgardian infections. Something to do with ‘a robust immune response.’”

Rogers supposes that makes sense, if anything does. He moves on to the bandages around Loki’s too-thin wrists, which prove even harder to unwrap than the ones on his chest. They are brittle and caked all the way through with blood, and the last layer pulls part of a large clot out with it. Loki makes a noise in the back of his throat like he’s been stabbed, and the hole fills with fresh blood that runs sluggishly into his palm.

“Shit,” Rogers says, pressing a handful of gauze against the wound.

“It is no worse than it was earlier,” Loki says, his voice a little faint and very slightly amused. “I have lost a great deal more blood than this and lived.”

 _Well, you’re my responsibility now_ , Rogers almost says, and where the hell did _that_ come from? He busies himself with the bandages instead of actually saying it or trying to figure out why he wanted to and moves on to Loki’s left knee once he finishes with the wrists. Bruising covers most of his exposed skin, but it’s especially dark and swollen around the joint, and a quick examination is enough for him to agree with Loki’s assessment that the knee is dislocated. He grips the leg above and below the joint, and Loki inhales sharply. “Brace yourself, and think about something else,” Rogers says.

“You said—you read my file,” Loki says, sounding winded. “Did it happen to say how long—” He breaks off with a gasp as Rogers pops the bone back into place.

“How long you’ve been on Earth?” Rogers asks. Loki nods, apparently unable to speak for the moment. “About a year.”

Loki releases a long breath, his head drooping lower. “I…had wondered…I lost track of time quickly, but I thought it might be something like that. Unless I was much mistaken and perceiving a longer stretch of time than it truly was. I…had hoped…” He doesn’t finish the sentence, and Rogers sees no reason to push for more.

He sets and wraps two obvious leg fractures, Loki still twitching and shaking under his hands but more audible now with the occasional bitten-off whimper, as if he’s too exhausted to keep himself silent anymore. He lets out a long breath without actually relaxing when Rogers starts working on the many cuts and burns, and since he hasn’t tried to pull away yet, Rogers doesn’t comment on that either. He uses up about half a tube of triple antibiotic ointment on Loki’s various surface injuries, figuring that’s better than nothing, then carefully removes the ankle bandages. The hole in his right leg looks bad, leaking a yellow fluid, so Rogers wraps it loosely to let it drain and makes a mental note to clean it better in the morning. Finally he gets Loki into a t-shirt and a pair of underwear (the latter is trickier, involving holding him up with one arm and pulling up the shorts with the other, Loki rigid in his grasp the whole time but completely unable to support himself). The t-shirt mostly just makes him look even skinnier, the way it drapes over his nearly skeletal frame, but at least it’s not a bloodied hospital gown. He’ll have to deal with that at some point too, but for the moment he just rolls it up with as much of the blood on the inside as possible and stuffs it into one of the backpacks.

Loki’s slumping in the chair by the time Rogers is done, his eyes half shut, and Rogers can feel the long day starting to catch up to him too. He glances at his watch, unsurprised to find it’s almost 2 a.m., and finally straightens from where he’s been kneeling next to the wheelchair. Loki barely reacts as Rogers wheels him into the bedroom, rousing only when Rogers actually deposits him on the bed and pulls the blankets up around him, and then he says, “This is…this is your bed.”

The answer to that goes without saying, so Rogers doesn’t say it. The bed’s a double, so it’s big enough to share if they’re careful, but frankly that sounds unnecessarily complicated at the moment. “I’ll take the couch.”

Loki blinks up at him, seems about to say something, and sinks back into the pillows instead. Rogers nods to him and leaves the room, shutting the door behind him. Getting into more comfortable clothes and pulling a blanket from the closet only takes a couple minutes, and then—just like always—he falls asleep quickly and doesn’t dream. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Because I tend to fixate on things that really don't matter, I spent an _absurd_ amount of time on Google Street View looking around for specific locations where parts of this fic take place. The Walmart they visit is real, which is why I mentioned its underground parking garage; if for some reason anyone wants to look it up, it's located at 5929 Georgia Ave NW in DC. I also spent way too much time poking around for apartments, because again, I fixate on pointless details. In case anyone's interested, 4903 Edgemoor Ln in Bethesda is a decent stand-in for the apartment building, and the interior layout I imagined for Rogers' safehouse looks pretty similar to [this apartment](https://www.apartmentlist.com/listing#u40779687). I KNOW. NO ONE CARES. But again, I spent a ridiculous amount of time finding this stuff, so I'm at least going to share. 
> 
> 2\. Why is Rogers' safehouse in Bethesda? Well, because I wanted to make a [Fallout 3](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallout_3) reference and I couldn't figure out anything more subtle. (Also, Bethesda and Steve's actual _Captain America: The Winter Soldier_ apartment appear to be on the same Metro line, which is the sort of pointless detail that pleases me and probably interests no one else.)
> 
> 3\. Basically everything I know about injuries and wound care as described in this fic comes from Googling, getting overwhelmed and/or grossed out, not finding exactly what I needed, and just going with what I already planned to write. So, uh, please just go with it, unless something is a) egregiously wrong and b) relatively easy to fix, in which case please let me know.
> 
> 4\. The Winter Soldier as depicted in this fic is entirely my own interpretation of _Captain America: The Winter Soldier_ and not influenced by the comics (and only marginally influenced by fic I've read about Bucky, for that matter), so I can't say if any of it's accurate. Mainly I focused on trying to keep it internally consistent.
> 
>  **Up next:** Loki has a bad night.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Chapter-specific warnings:** explicit suicidal thoughts (if you need to, you can skip everything after Rogers leaves the room, up until the last couple paragraphs), dehumanization, paralysis

For a span of time that is probably only a few moments but feels much longer, Loki lies still in Rogers’ bed, too full of sick exhaustion to sleep. He has escaped at last, unbelievably, but he can find in himself no relief, only a dull sort of surprise that he is still alive—surprise, and something that feels a little like grief.

Against his will, his thoughts turn toward HYDRA, and what exactly he has just escaped. Finally he allows himself to consider what Rogers told him, that he was HYDRA’s prisoner for an entire year, and his stomach clenches at the thought. A year is an almost inconsequential length of time compared to the overall lifespan of…well, of anyone accustomed to Asgardian lifespans, since he is not Aesir and never was. But a year as Midgard marks time is still a year on Asgard, weeks and months in which anything can (and occasionally does) happen. The broken Bifrost would have made travel difficult, not impossible, and it should have done nothing to impede Heimdall’s sight.

So now he knows, after all this time, what his false family truly thinks of him. If they ever cared, they would have found him, would have torn HYDRA apart to free him, and instead they left him to be carved apart over and over again, all their reassuring words of love and belonging proven meaningless. They _knew_ , they must have known, and they did nothing, because they all knew he was only a _thing_ who thought it was a person, and what would it matter if a thing were finally treated like the soulless object it was? It would be a little funny, under other circumstances—these honorable, noble Aesir, proving themselves far greater liars than he, the supposed god of mischief, the one who could never be trusted because of his ease with trickery and deception. He did enjoy exposing just that sort of hypocrisy, once. He is not sure when, if ever, he will find anything truly funny or enjoyable again, and he wishes with sudden, nauseating intensity that everything had _stopped_ when he let go, just as he intended. That he could forget his false family as quickly and easily as they have clearly forgotten him.

It hurts, it all hurts, but he is too tired to hang onto any emotion for long. Eventually his thoughts begin to break apart, becoming nonsensical and disconnected, and exhaustion triumphs over the pain of his broken body to drag him down into a deep sleep.

* * *

Loki dreams—

He is pinned down, dizzy with drugs and constant blood loss, the table beneath him cold and unyielding, artificial lights blinding him, and for a moment he is not sure whether he is going to laugh or vomit. Of course he is back, of course he never escaped—he will be here, cut apart again and again, until the scientists have carved every last secret from his flesh and bones and blood, have finally grown bored with him, and then perhaps they will let him die. (He does not think they will ever let him die, not as long as they have any use for him at all, and these humans have proven themselves to be nothing if not inventive.)

Something sharp presses up under him and into his lower back, fresh biting pain of a tiny blade slicing through skin and muscle, and he cannot even try to pull away from it. The blade presses deeper, scrapes against the bones of his spine, and then something _splits_ and he stops feeling the blade, stops feeling anything from his waist down. He realizes sluggishly that they have severed his spinal cord, no doubt to see whether it will repair itself, and at some level he knows this should terrify him. He has never experienced an injury like this before, has no idea whether he can heal from it, and yet all he can feel is relief because _half of his body is no longer in pain_. Perhaps he will remain badly crippled for whatever portion of his life remains, but he cannot even begin to care. Not when some of the constant agony is gone.

He barely notices at first that the scientists have turned away and the light has stopped blinding him. Then he hears, very distinctly, a voice he thought never to hear again: “Loki.”

Distantly he thinks no, this isn’t right, but his heart begins to pound painfully under damaged ribs and he manages to raise his head enough to see— “ _Father_?”

Odin sighs, his expression hard and unreadable. “Oh, Loki. Look at you.”

“Help me,” he gasps, barely able to get the words out past the sudden tightness in his chest. “Please, I can’t—”

“Have you no shame?” another voice cuts in, and Thor steps up beside his father. “You should be on your knees where you belong, runt, begging forgiveness for repaying boundless generosity with treason. Not demanding _favors_.”

Loki stares at them. Against his will, tears begin to well in his eyes. “Papa—please—”

“He always was weak, wasn’t he?” Frigga says. “I had hoped he would grow out of it. I suppose it’s not terribly surprising that he would become…this. Utterly undone by mere mortals.” She shakes her head pityingly.

“No,” Loki says hoarsely. “Mama, no, I—”

“And he still has the gall to call you his parents,” Thor says, his lip curling in disgust. He glares at Loki. “You sicken me. You always did, but I never understood why—until I learned what you are.”

Loki can only gape at them, his chest heaving and his vision blurring. “But you…you said…”

“Be silent,” Odin says. “Show me there is _anything_ of worth left of you and perhaps I will grant you mercy. Get off that table and meet your fate standing like a man.”

Loki’s throat closes. He can’t move, can’t they see he can’t _move_ —but if this is his only chance—

He rips one arm up from the bolt holding it down, chokes as agony drowns out everything else, and then tears the other arm free. The table grows slick with blood as he struggles to sit up, but he is half paralyzed and his arms tremble too badly to take his weight.

“Well, Father,” Thor says, “I believe you have your answer.”

“ _No_ ,” Loki chokes out, scrabbling at the edge of the table. He manages to push himself up on his elbows and then he is slipping, falling, and he crashes to the floor. For a moment he can only lie there, stunned and gasping, his head ringing and his lungs empty.

Thor sneers at him. “To think I once called you _brother_. You tried to die like a coward and you failed even at that. I would not sully my hands by ending your pathetic life.”

“Please,” Loki gasps. He stretches one hand out toward them; he can do nothing else. His entire lower body is still nothing but a great _absence_ , and something in his chest seems to have torn when he fell. “Please, have mercy—kill me—”

There is no sympathy in Odin’s gaze. “I showed you mercy once, centuries ago on Jotunheim. I will not make that mistake again, Loki Laufeyson.”

“No,” he whispers, and then “Please, I’m sorry, _please_ ,” but all that comes out is blood. As one, his former father, brother, and mother turn their backs on him and walk away.

“No,” Loki chokes out again. “Please…no…” Only deafening silence answers him—until the scientists return and close in on him, and then he learns that he still has the breath to scream after all.

* * *

 He wakes, and he knows he is awake only because now the pain shrieking down every nerve is real, not faded memory—and hard on the heels of pain comes blinding terror, because he is _still trapped_ , he’s on a hard surface and he is bound by something hot and suffocating, and if he is back—if he has wasted his chance yet again—

There’s a voice saying his name, just like in the dream when his former family intruded on a real memory, and that is almost worse—he cannot hear this again, cannot bear their disgust and rejection _again_ , and if he is still not awake even when he _knows_ he is awake then he has no idea what is real and surely that can only mean they’ve broken his mind at last, made him their puppet, and he can’t move and he can’t _breathe_ —

Hands pull away the material stifling him and he gasps, shrinking back. But that is—that is not right, is it? If he is in the lab, he should not be able to move at all, and no one would help him.

“Loki,” his name again, and now he actually hears the voice speaking, the flat quality and lack of much emotional inflection, and he recognizes Rogers. Realizes abruptly that he is not _there_ , he is in Rogers’ safehouse lying on the floor, tangled up in his blankets. But he is still trapped, his pounding heart still sending fresh jolts of pain through his ribcage, and he knows he will only hurt himself if he struggles but he can’t move and he can’t seem to get enough air into his lungs no matter how hard he tries—

Rogers yanks the blankets back, the motion wrenching against torn skin and grinding broken bones together, and Loki’s vision goes white with pain. Then there is a shock of cold air on his skin, and he feels himself slump to the carpet, head falling back and mouth opening on an nearly airless gasp.

When he can breathe properly again and the pain in his limbs and his core has settled back into a more bearable ache, he tilts his head to get a better look at Rogers. The other man is crouching a short distance away, blankets in a pile on the floor next to him, and his stare is an unnerving combination of blank and intent. He is absolutely still, balanced as he is on the balls of his feet, and his bearing puts Loki more in mind of a cat stalking its prey than a soldier.

Of course, Rogers is no ordinary soldier. Loki wonders, with a very distant sort of curiosity, who he used to be and what Rogers the human would think about what he’s become. He supposes he’s going to find out, now, and that thought carries with it a flicker of dull surprise, because he had not expected…anything, really. His last desperate gambit to escape worked and he hadn’t made any plans, hadn’t looked past Rogers discovering the lie and disposing of him for it. But that did not happen, and now he has no idea what to do.

If it has taught him nothing else, the past year has taught him that his body will heal, given time—but to what end?

He wants the pain back, suddenly, because when his nerves are screaming with it and he is struggling to breathe, at least then he cannot _think_ , cannot contemplate the future stretching ahead of him and the inescapable question: he is not dead, so _what is he supposed to do next_?

And Rogers is just looking at him with those blue, blue eyes, and Loki wants his brother so badly he _aches_ with it and hates himself for the wanting. Thor is not here. Thor does not care about him, because otherwise he would not have abandoned Loki to be carved open and broken apart in a Midgardian lab for a _year_ —would have listened, this one time when Loki needed him most to listen. At first he’d thought perhaps, perhaps…but time dragged on with more knives and poisons and blood and pain, and he realized that all Thor’s words on the Bifrost were meaningless things, tossed aside when Thor finally learned what manner of monster he had been taught to call _brother_.

It should not have hurt, after everything, to recognize this. But just as there seemed no limit to the depths of pain his body could experience, so too did he discover that every new sting of rejection or betrayal sank deep into what was left of his spirit. The surge of disbelieving hope he’d felt in the lab, at the sight of blue eyes, long blond hair, a solidly muscled physique, and even the scruffy hint of a beard like Thor’s when he was younger—all of it was enough to galvanize him past his agony and his drugged stupor, and for nothing, because _of course_ it was not Thor come to save him at last. Of course Thor had forgotten the worthless Jotunn runt who had followed him loyally for so long. Of course Odin and Frigga had lied about loving him, just as they had lied about who and what he was.

And still Loki cannot stop his treacherous, pathetically weak heart and mind from longing for his former family, cannot stop that visceral flash of childlike need every time he catches an unguarded glance of Rogers’ face. The only comfort here is that Rogers does not pity him, perhaps is not even capable of pity, and that is…well, it is not what he wants, but what he wants is forever lost to him, and a companion incapable of pity is at least better than a great many alternatives.

“You planning to just stay on the floor?” Rogers says, and Loki flinches, abruptly snapped out of his thoughts.

“The floor does have a great deal to recommend it,” he says, unsure whether he even means to mock the soldier’s question or not. At least down here he will not have to worry about tumbling off and reinjuring himself again. He knows he needs to rest, and unconsciousness is no less desirable than it was when the scientists were cutting him apart every day, but his body has become one great throbbing ache, and almost everything inside him feels twisted, broken, _wrong_. He clears his throat. “I was not sleeping terribly well, I think, even before…that.”

“Your bed’s too soft, right?” Rogers says, and then snaps his mouth shut with a vaguely startled expression Loki is already beginning to find familiar, the one that means _why did I say that? Why do I know that?_ Loki envies him, a little. What would it be like, to give back the truths he never wanted to learn, the realities he never wanted to confront? All his life he hated the feeling of _not knowing_ , whether it was arcane magical knowledge or historical trivia with which to stump his tutors or secrets he could turn to his own purposes—and then to learn the secret about himself that explained _everything_ , to see every slight and rejection fall into a horrible and suddenly understandable pattern, to want so badly to return to the ignorance he did not know was bliss until he lost it forever…well, he might have laughed at the irony, had he read of it in a tale. The taste of it now is far too bitter in his mouth for that.

And Rogers is more or less right, he supposes. After a year on a metal table, the bed is indeed absurdly soft, to the extent that the carpeted floor feels a little less unnatural. It is certainly better than admitting that he is afraid of another nightmare. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, exactly. I would prefer to stay here.”

“Okay,” Rogers says, taking this in stride as he seems to do with nearly everything (as he has been made to do, or as the man he once was had done?). He grabs the pillow off the bed and helps Loki sit up enough to position it under his head, and then he shakes out the blankets from their pile on the floor and spreads them over Loki’s body, and Loki can only look at him with no idea how to respond.

“Thank you,” he says finally. Rogers nods and retreats to the front room, leaving the bedroom door ajar and Loki alone with his churning thoughts.

Everything is quiet, the silence seeming to weigh on his ears. After being shocked into wakefulness, he cannot easily slip back into sleep, so he stares up at the darkened ceiling and tries not to think. As with everything else he has tried to do within recent memory, he fails, his mind circling back to the inevitable question he wants most to avoid. The words repeat endlessly in his head, a helpless litany of _now what now what now what_ —

Letting himself fall from the Bifrost was easy. There was no planning, no effort, almost no thought, just the simple act of opening his hand.

And now—

He is not sure, truthfully, whether he could do it, or whether he would want to, if he thought he possessed the nerve. He knows how, certainly; specializing in bladework meant becoming familiar with the most effective places to strike, and after the past year…well. He knows a great deal more, now, about the vulnerable points in his own body, about how much damage he can take and how much blood he can lose without dying. He knows what it would take to kill him.

And he still wants, very much, to complete what he started on the edge of the Bifrost. To be finished, _done_ , unable to remember Odin’s disappointment as he looked down at the monster he’d tried to raise as a man, or Frigga’s shock as she caught the first true glimpse of the thing she had called _son_ —unable to imagine the disgust in Thor’s eyes when he was finally told what Loki was. Unable to wonder how Thor and his friends, who had always at least tolerated him, would want to kill him and thereby cleanse their memories of his tainting presence—if it would be Sif’s spear, Fandral’s sword, Hogun’s mace, Volstagg’s axe, to spare Thor the unpleasant task, or if it would be Mjolnir after all. If the great hammer would flatten his skull with a single blow, or if Thor would pin him with it, as he did on the Bifrost, and pay back his own humiliation at having been tricked into feeling affection for a Jotun by tearing off Loki’s limbs with his bare hands (or worse, and he can imagine now a great deal that would be worse).

He does not want to imagine how his former family must have laughed when Heimdall told them how pathetic their pet Jotun runt had become, clamped to a table in a Midgardian laboratory to be carved apart like meat, weeping and begging for them to save him. Perhaps Frigga did not laugh; perhaps she turned away, lips thinned with displeasure, embarrassed that the runt could not even maintain the dignity she had worked so hard to teach it.

He does not want to remember being carved apart like meat. Does not want to remember the awful crawling violation of it, its own distinct horror despite the constant pain, of cold impersonal hands on his body, pulling apart his flesh, digging through his insides, touching _everything_ until no part of him remained that was his alone—that was his at all, because his body belonged to them utterly.

He wants to be dead. He wants the Void to have done it, or the landing, or Rogers, who is not quite enough like Thor to kill impulsively in his anger, or perhaps no longer human enough to be entirely overtaken by any emotion at all. He does not want to think about taking the knife he has kept concealed since Rogers gave it to him and determining which veins to open so he will bleed out before he loses consciousness and cannot finish the job, or trying to hunt down the right combination of substances that would actually kill him, or even rolling himself painfully to his front and pressing his face to the pillow until he suffocates.

He wants Thor to have killed him on the Bifrost, as he should have done. He does not want Heimdall to inform his king that the Jotun runt has escaped its rightful captivity and for Thor to hunt him down like a beast. He does not want Thor’s face, twisted with hatred and contempt, to be the last thing he sees.

That thought, more than anything else, sends a frisson of fear through him, and he feeds a trickle of his slowly recovering magic into a veil that will shield him from Heimdall’s sight. Once it was as natural as breathing; now, even this slight pull on his magic is enough to start a dull pain throbbing behind his eyes. But it is bearable, only an afterthought next to the ache everywhere else, and it will fade as he regains strength. (If he regains strength.) He can only hope no one was watching him in the brief period between this moment and the year he spent with no need and less ability to shield himself.

The other consideration, of course, is Rogers himself, who should have killed him but did not and thereby left the scales unbalanced. For all that he told Rogers there was little he could do, he still owes the man a considerable debt, and that knowledge sits uneasily within him. Loki has no place in Valhalla anyway, but he dislikes leaving a debt unpaid, so at least…he must try to help. If he fails, perhaps Rogers will kill him after all, and at least that would cancel out the debt. It is almost certainly the best he can hope for—and, he thinks as he finally begins to drift back to sleep, rather more than he deserves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hopefully this is fairly clear in context, but I wanted to emphasize that nothing from Loki's POV is character-bashing on my part; it's just that it's from his perspective and he's not always a reliable narrator in terms of others' thoughts and attitudes toward him. Plus he doesn't necessarily have all the relevant information.
> 
> **Up next:** Loki has a bad morning.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Chapter-specific warnings:** More description of injuries, more starvation/disordered eating, more nonsexual (and uncomfortable) nudity, brief Holocaust mention, me pretending to know more about medical stuff than I actually do

Loki wakes, gradually, to the sun slanting through the bedroom window and across the wall, leaving him still in shadow next to the bed. If he is stiff from sleeping on the floor, he cannot tell; the carpet is still considerably more comfortable than the laboratory table, and he is not sure whether such a mild pain would even register at this point. He is reasonably certain this is the longest he’s gone without fresh injury in the past year, and it is certainly the most untroubled sleep he’s had since his arrival on Midgard. He does feel fractionally better already, although given his present basis for comparison, that doesn’t mean a great deal.

He shifts cautiously under the blankets, taking stock as he lacked the energy to do earlier. He aches, everywhere, and his body as a whole feels weak and broken and _wrong_ , even where his bones are not shattered or otherwise damaged. Sharper pains punctuate the persistent ache whenever he moves—his ribs twinge when he is careful to breathe a little more shallowly than usual, spiking into a jab of pain in the bones when he forgets. But he has to move to determine how bad the damage is and how much he is still able to move, so he steels himself and begins carefully shifting his limbs, one at a time.

Nearly all his toes feel nonfunctional, which would concern him more if he had any illusions about trying to stand or walk in the near future. He does not, because aside from the newer breaks that Rogers set only last night and the literal holes through each ankle, he can feel with painful clarity all the other, older fractures in various stages of healing. There is one place in particular, below his right knee, where the bone was shattered in a way Rogers would not have been able to set; he thinks the fragments are more or less back in the right places and beginning to knit together again, but he certainly cannot put any weight on it yet. His hip seems to be almost entirely healed, as does his spine—he cannot remember now which injury happened when, but he supposes these must have been older—so at least there is that. Similar cracks, some nearly healed and others almost fresh, continue upward across his rib cage and down both arms, but his collarbone is not too bad anymore, so that must be an older one as well. The very faint, almost fully healed fractures in his skull are definitely old; he thinks it was quite early on that they switched to less invasive methods for examining his brain. His skin, certainly, could be in better shape, but at least the largest incision in his chest seems to have scabbed over well enough, and most of the more minor cuts and burns are only an annoyance in comparison to everything else.

He does not particularly want to think about his internal soft-tissue injuries at all, or how much of him is simply _missing_ , but the constant ache in his entire torso is hard to ignore. As he told Rogers, though, he thinks that will mostly take care of itself, and in any event there is not a great deal he can do about it at the moment.

His hands are…bad. There is no other word for it. The recently set and wrapped fingers are mostly immobile, but those are not so terrible; he can at least push past the pain of older breaks and curl his fingers enough to grasp something loosely. The bone they crushed at the base of his left thumb some time ago doesn’t seem to be healing well, though, which is a bit of a concern; far worse are the holes in his wrists and the associated damage to bone, tendon, and muscle alike. The surge of pain when he tries to bend his wrist is nauseating, blinding, and he knows he will not be able to use his hands properly for…he does not know how long, except that it will not be soon. He certainly cannot push or pull anything heavier than perhaps a small knife, or make a fist, or even push himself up off the floor unaided (he can do that with his elbows, possibly).

It is a small— _very_ small—comfort that he knows adrenaline should enable him to do a bit more, when he has the greatest need of it. Actually using a knife sounds unbearable at the moment, but when he had Rogers’ knife in the back of that store, tense and excruciatingly alert for any discovery, he’d noticed the pain a bit less, enough that he’d known he could at least attempt to defend himself. So, he supposes, he is not _completely_ helpless; with an adequate flood of terror and the accompanying chemicals that will either block the pain or let him ignore it, he can at least cause some annoyance to anyone who tries to recapture him.

Much good it will do him, if he can do nothing else and they take him back despite his best efforts.

Ordinarily, of course, he could rely on his _seidr_ , and would do so whether or not he was injured, but that too is unreliable now. Whatever drugs the scientists were using still linger in his blood, and he suspects it will take some time for the effects to wear off completely. He has at least recovered the small amount of usable magic he was able to employ the previous night and a bit more besides, but the vast majority of the limited _seidr_ available to him is going directly toward healing his body and keeping it functioning. With some concentration and effort, he could perhaps divert some of that to other purposes, after which he would almost certainly pass out before he could actually use any of it.

So yes, he is not entirely helpless, but so nearly as to make almost no difference, and he can do almost nothing except depend on Rogers either to help him or kill him—an improvement upon his previous situation, to be sure, although not by terribly much.

He has not had a chance to look in a mirror and does not particularly want to do so now; freed of the table, he has been able to see most of his body, and between that sight and the way he feels, he has a very good idea of his own ravaged state. He heard enough of the scientists’ talk to know that they consistently provided him with the nutrients they’d determined his body required, at least when the lack of some or all of those nutrients was not part of an experiment, but it was also in their best interests to keep him weak and they never gave him enough. He is not sure, even now, if he is capable of dying of hunger—he has never heard of such a fate befalling any of the Aesir, although of course that fact is hardly relevant to him—but he does know that he will deteriorate without enough nourishment. Basic, everyday actions require energy provided only by food and sleep, after all, and magic requires a great deal more. Despite being unable to move, he still expended a tremendous amount of energy in the lab from the endless cycle of physical trauma and healing, vastly more than the drip of chemicals he was provided to replenish it. Which the scientists knew, because they discussed that too and made adjustments accordingly to make sure he never regained enough strength to do anything but continue, unwillingly, to survive.

Now, _starved_ is the only truly accurate word for the condition of his body, even if he does not know whether he could have died of it (if this follows the pattern of everything else in his life lately, he considers eternal misery far more likely). He has never achieved a stature like Thor’s, of course, but he used to be all lean, wiry muscle, and now every bit of that is shriveled away to little more than skin stretched thin and tight over bone. And it is not going to improve soon. If he survives long enough to truly recover, he is quite sure the process will take a much longer time than it should.

Cautiously, he draws an experimental deep breath and immediately regrets it as pain sears through his damaged lungs, and he doubles up on the floor, coughing violently. Everything inside him is tearing loose, he is almost sure of it, and he can’t breathe, and the nauseating tang of blood is filling his mouth.

Rogers is there again, helping him sit up and supporting him until the fit passes, and then Loki sags against him, too drained to pull away no matter how much he wants to. Yes, he is slightly recovered compared to his state when Rogers carried him out of the scientists’ chamber of horrors, but that is almost meaningless when he still cannot even breathe without his body collapsing into weakness.

“You want to sleep more, or are you up now?” Rogers asks after a moment.

Loki wants to say something deadpan, about the obvious lateness of the hour or Rogers’ penchant for asking inane questions, but he has neither the breath nor the energy. Not that it particularly matters—grasping after a touch of normality, of his _self_ , is not truly going to help him. “The latter.”

Rogers nods, moves the blankets and pillow back to the bed, and picks Loki up again. Then the soldier carries him into the bathroom and helps him use the toilet, first. Loki keeps his face turned away and doesn’t speak, trying to fight down a fresh wave of humiliation at the way Rogers essentially has to manipulate him like a doll. He can’t stand, with or without support, and he can’t even pull his own underclothing back up, so Rogers does it for him. Then Rogers sits Loki back down on the closed lid of the toilet and just looks at him for a moment. Loki doesn’t like his silent scrutiny any better for the fact that there’s no particular intent to it. He is intensely aware that Rogers can do anything he wants and there is not much he can do in response, his earlier bravado notwithstanding, and Loki will not draw Rogers’ attention to that fact if he has somehow not already realized. He lifts his chin and snaps, “What?”

“Trying to figure out the best way to get you cleaned up,” Rogers says, apparently unperturbed.

The idea of being _clean_ again hits him so hard and viscerally he nearly weeps with longing, and he turns the glare up a notch to compensate. Damn Rogers for making Loki want what he cannot easily have. “A wet rag would suffice for now, I should think, unless you somehow have a better idea.”

Rogers shrugs. “Well, you can’t shower and I’d rather not redo all the bandages after a bath, so yeah, probably.” Without further deliberation, he carries Loki back to the bed and props him up with the pillows, and then he disappears back into the bathroom, returning with a towel, some washcloths, and a bar of soap, all of which he leaves on the bed and goes to the kitchen for a bowl of water. Then he sets to work scrubbing down Loki’s skin wherever it is not covered with bandages.

Once more, Loki finds himself staring up at the ceiling and trying not to think. He wants the blood and sweat and chemicals wiped away, even if this method doesn’t remotely compare to the comfort a bath would provide, and he wants to be clean badly enough that he will keep himself still for this, but…Rogers has to undress him again, and he has to touch him. Of course he does; there is no way to wipe a cloth over his torn, sticky flesh without touching him, everywhere, and Loki recognizes that this is practical reality, and still it is all he can do to keep his breathing under control at the crawling sensation of fingers on his skin.

And then there is the shame burning through him, once again. He supposes it makes very little sense, from a purely logical standpoint, that he should feel ashamed for Rogers to see him like this. He has had no privacy for an entire year, even inside his own body, and Rogers is not…well, he has no human or scientific reasons to be curious. He doesn’t look or touch any more than he needs to, for which Loki cannot help feeling grateful and then angry that he is grateful. Rogers’ expression is still a touch too blank to be kindness or concern, and not quite blank enough to be true indifference or the scientists’ impersonal curiosity; his movements are too brusque to be considered gentle, but neither are they rough enough to be deliberately unkind, and because Loki does not know what to think about any of it, he focuses once again on merely enduring.

It’s easier once he’s clothed again, this time in a fresh version of the shirt from earlier and a pair of loose trousers, but it’s only when Rogers finally steps back that Loki’s heart starts to settle and he is able to uncurl his fingers from their painful clench.

“ _What_ ,” he says again, because Rogers is still studying him.

“Your ankle,” Rogers says, pointing, and Loki glances down at the ugly wound above his right foot to see that the skin is red and angry, hinting at the beginnings of infection. “Your body going to take care of that, or do you need antibiotics?”

Loki shrugs, a twitchy gesture, then remembers the relevant experiments and shakes his head. “They deliberately caused infections a few times and I healed, eventually, without additional medicine.”

“Well, cleaning can only help it along, right?” Rogers says. Loki shrugs again, and Rogers goes back into the front room and returns with the pack full of medical supplies. He removes a few items, sits down on the bed, and tugs up the leg of Loki’s trousers to his knee before tearing open a little packet.

Loki flinches back, hard, his body reacting before he can even consciously recognize the smell. It is sharp, metallic, biting, and he is back in the lab, pinned down and unable to move, tensed for the fresh slice of pain that always follows the swipe of their cold chemicals.

“ _No_ ,” he says, and when his voice shakes, he realizes he is shaking too.

“It’s just a Betadine wipe,” Rogers says. “Iodine.”

“Use something else.”

“What’s wrong with iodine?”

“The smell,” Loki says. He has to force the words out.

“So breathe through your mouth,” Rogers says, not unkindly. “This needs to be cleaned.”

Loki glares at him, knowing he is being unreasonable but too hideously aware of his own vulnerability to stop. It was easy to forget in that first brief heady rush of escape, but he is scarcely any less helpless now than he was in the lab, and he hates the visceral certainty that Rogers can do anything he wants and Loki will be able to do very little to stop him. He cannot even use the man’s sense of sympathy or pity, and for all that he _does not want_ anyone’s pity, at least that would let him take this weakness he cannot hide and use it for _something_. Instead he has nothing, just Rogers’ desire to recover his memories and the slight possibility that Loki can give him what he wants—and the chance, not without precedent but too tenuous to give him any reassurance, that Rogers will listen when Loki speaks. So he presses back into the pillows, heart pounding, and snarls, “Use. Something. _Else_.”

Rogers considers him for a moment, head tilted to one side and expression utterly opaque, and then he pulls a brown bottle from his pack. “Hydrogen peroxide. It’ll sting more, though, and it’s messier. Doesn’t work as well, either.”

“Fine,” Loki says tightly, and Rogers opens the bottle and gets to work. He’s right, it does sting, and the liquid fizzes and bubbles alarmingly when it touches the wound, but Loki grits his teeth and refuses to care. Everything hurts anyway.

Rogers wipes up the excess fluid, smears the wound with some kind of ointment that thankfully doesn’t smell very strong, covers Loki’s bare feet with socks, and settles him back in the wheelchair. The clothes feel strange on his skin, rough in places where he is scraped raw, but at least most of his injuries are hidden now. Of course, he can feel every single one, so being unable to see the state of his body does little to help him forget what has been done to him—and for all that he feels slightly less vulnerable for being covered, a thin layer of fabric makes very little practical difference. Somehow, it helps anyway.

Loki’s marginally improved spirits last exactly as long as it takes Rogers to wheel him out to the front room. His gaze is immediately drawn to the plastic bags on the kitchen counter, and he realizes with an unpleasant jolt that they’re new since last night, which can only mean— “You _left_ ,” he says, and he cannot keep the accusing tone out of his voice no matter how much he hates this display of the shamefully pathetic state to which he has sunk.

Rogers parks him by the couch and starts pulling things out of the bags—colorful bottles and boxes, mostly. “You were still asleep, and it was quicker this way. I just went to the CVS two streets over for more supplies.”

Loki is shaking again and he hates it, hates Rogers, hates himself. “They could have come while you were gone,” he says, and instead of coming out angry his voice sounds so damned _small_ and why can’t he _stop_ himself from showing all this vulnerability, over and over again, when he _knows_ Rogers won’t respond to it in any way Loki can use to keep himself safe?

“It was only for 19 minutes,” Rogers says, but he has that considering look again that Loki cannot read and does not understand, and after a moment he adds almost gently, “HYDRA doesn’t know we’re here. We weren’t followed. I checked.”

And there is nothing Loki can say to that, nothing that will not simply emphasize his own powerlessness and the sickening realization that he has already begun to trust Rogers. He cannot, _cannot_ allow his weakness to make him so stupid.

Rogers waits a moment for Loki to respond; when no reply is forthcoming, he shrugs and picks up one of the brightly colored bottles—red, next to blue and green, and most likely the colors are significant, but Loki cannot imagine how and Rogers offers no explanation. Instead he unscrews the cap and sticks a long, thin tube inside, like a much larger version of the little tube Loki used to drink his milk last night. He brings the bottle to Loki, again balancing it on the wheelchair’s arm and helping Loki work out a way to hold it.

Loki lowers his head and sucks tentatively at the tube as Rogers goes back to the kitchen. The liquid, when it hits his tongue, is strange—neither pleasant nor unpleasant, with an oddly salty edge to its artificial sweetness.

“Gatorade,” Rogers says. For himself, he unwraps a sandwich. Loki can see from here that the lettuce is wilted and the meat is some disgusting Midgardian thing processed beyond all recognition, and in that moment he cannot imagine wanting anything more. “Help replenish your electrolytes.”

Loki is not sure what that means and does not especially care, not when he can _see_ real food he cannot eat. “Do you suppose,” he says, acidly polite, “that at some point I will be permitted food I will actually be required to _chew_?”

Rogers leans against the counter, studying him again. “What do you know about refeeding syndrome?”

Nothing, at least by that specific term, although under the circumstances he can guess. “Enlighten me.”

“Somebody’s malnourished or starving and you give them too many nutrients their body can’t handle anymore, the shock can actually kill them. Lot of people released from Nazi concentration camps died right afterward because US soldiers fed them without knowing any better. Died smiling, sometimes.”

“That’s a very specific piece of knowledge,” Loki observes, because if he has to feel unsettled and on edge, at least he can make Rogers feel the same.

Rogers blinks at him, momentary incomprehension shifting into the look of someone who’s just missed a step in the dark, and it’s oddly unsatisfying. He’s almost relieved when he can actually see Rogers set the question aside. “Point is, I don’t know if that kind of thing would affect you or not, especially with whatever IV drip they had you on, and I’m not a doctor. I figured it was smartest to start simple.”

Well, he cannot really argue that point, and there is nothing to be gained by a snide comment about the validity of what Rogers does or does not consider “smart.” Loki sighs through his nose and goes back to his drink, trying to ignore how strongly it tastes of chemicals.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anything in the scene about Rogers trying to clean up Loki's injuries is even remotely accurate, it's thanks to the helpful people at [Little Details](http://little-details.livejournal.com), and anything that's wrong is wrong despite them (again, because I couldn't find exactly what I was looking for and wanted to keep the scene I'd written without major changes).
> 
> **Up next:** I indulge in telepathic nonsense and AU/alt-history Googling.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Chapter-specific warnings:** discussion of suicidal thoughts; telepathic nonsense

“So,” Rogers says, when Loki finally finishes the Gatorade, or at least doesn’t seem like he’s going to drink any more. “You said you could try to help me find out who I am. How do you plan to do that?”

“I am sure there is research that could be done,” Loki says. “Public records and so forth. Or HYDRA’s files—”

Rogers shakes his head. “The really important stuff is on a server I can’t access without being there in person, and it would be tough even then. I suppose you could help with that, eventually.”

“Perhaps,” Loki says. “There are also…more direct methods.”

It takes Rogers a second to realize what Loki means. “You want to poke around in my head,” he says flatly. “With magic.”

“ _I_ want nothing. I am merely raising a possibility.”

“You could really do that?” Rogers says. “Just…give me back my memories?”

“I cannot guarantee anything,” Loki cautions. “I am not…I have very little experience with mind magic, although I am familiar with the theory. But I suspect HYDRA’s methods—regardless of their ultimate intent—had the effect of blocking your memories rather than destroying them, so yes, I may be able to restore access.”

“Yeah,” Rogers says after a moment’s hesitation. “Do it. I need to know.”

“Well, first of all, I need to determine whether HYDRA left any unpleasant surprises behind, before I look any further. I have the strength for that, at least.”

Yes, Rogers can imagine a number of unpleasant surprises, now that Loki’s brought it up—trigger phrases, sleeper commands, even a kill switch. “Okay,” he says. “And then you’ll try to fix my memory.”

“If I _can_ ,” Loki says, and then he gestures vaguely toward the couch. “Lie down, please.”

Rogers doesn’t move. “Why?”

“Because that way I will actually be able to reach your head. Contact is not strictly necessary, but it will make things easier for me, and I can think of no better way to do this. Unless, I suppose, you wish to rest your head directly in my lap.” His tone is faintly mocking, implying that of course Rogers won’t want to do that, and Rogers isn’t sure why. Loki takes in his expression and adds hastily, “Strike that. You are incapable of feeling embarrassment or awkwardness, aren’t you?”

“Probably,” Rogers says.

“And incapable of recognizing rhetorical questions, I see.”

“When they don’t sound like rhetorical questions and you only sometimes make sense anyway? Sure.” Rogers sits on the couch and swings his legs up so he can stretch out. It’s a vulnerable position and he doesn’t like it, but at least he knows he can trust his own reflexes.

Loki sighs. “I do not want any part of you putting weight on any part of me because I have _broken bones_. That is not so difficult to understand, is it? You could kneel, I suppose, but I imagine this is more comfortable.” He moves up until his knees are almost touching the couch, and when his face enters Rogers’ field of vision, he is grimacing. “Whoever invented this wheelchair clearly did not consider that a patient might not retain full use of his hands.”

“Well, not the kind of wheelchair you can walk out of Walmart, anyway,” Rogers says.

“Hm,” Loki says. “Now be quiet and hold still,” and he places one hand against Rogers’ forehead. For not quite five minutes Rogers feels nothing, just the slight pressure of Loki’s near-skeletal fingers at his temple. Every several seconds, a minute shiver runs through his hand, and the shakes get more frequent and more pronounced the longer Loki holds the position. But he doesn’t say anything, so Rogers doesn’t either.

“There you are,” Loki murmurs at last, his fingers twitching against Rogers’ head, and whatever he does magically, that part Rogers does feel—like a cord being snipped somewhere, or a haze of smoke clearing, or…something else he doesn’t have words for ( _the first deep breath with lungs that didn’t ache, the realization it could be this way and he never knew what he was missing_ ). He can feel the wrongness of it, now that it’s gone, and he has no idea how he never noticed before.

Well, he _does_ know, of course, that was the whole point of this exercise, but it’s still a strange feeling, like only realizing the pebble in his shoe was hurting him after shaking it out and registering the absence of pain.

Loki exhales and his hand vanishes, and Rogers sits up to face him. “All done?”

“For the time being,” Loki says, his voice mostly steady despite the new grayish cast to his skin. “I cannot…later, perhaps, I can work to uncover your memories. But I cleared out the obvious traps, and that should do for now.”

“Traps,” Rogers repeats. “Like what? I felt something—go.”

“I imagine that was the trigger phrases. You had a good half-dozen or so in there.”

“And they’re gone now?” Rogers asks, feeling suddenly cold. “You’re sure?”

“Only one way to find out, I suppose,” Loki says. “‘The third flower in the vase is green.’”

Rogers flinches—he _knows_ that phrase, somehow—but otherwise nothing happens. He meets Loki’s expectant gaze and says, “I don’t feel anything.”

“No? Ah, well.” Loki shrugs. “No harm in trying.”

“No _harm_ —?” Rogers says, staring at him. “What was that? An attack command?” He knows he’s right as he says it, can feel what it was, and when Loki hesitates a beat too long, he has his confirmation. “That would’ve made me attack you.”

“Given that there is no one else in the immediate vicinity, I suppose that would be the case,” Loki says lightly. “Now if you will excuse me, I believe I either need to lie down or find sustenance.”

Rogers grabs one of the wheels to keep Loki from leaving, although he can’t move much anyway. “Why do you want to die?”

Loki raises one eyebrow. “I never said that.”

“You didn’t have to,” Rogers says, annoyed and not sure why (but he holds onto that, because he knows the asset doesn’t feel annoyance). “The first time you saw me, you asked me to kill you—”

“Yes, because that was far preferable to remaining there to be tortured as long as I could be kept alive—”

“—and when I got you out,” Rogers continues, raising his voice a little but otherwise not acknowledging Loki’s interruption, “then you tried to goad me into killing you. I had to _ask_ what the other option was. And now—you’re healing, you’re regaining your magic, and you still don’t seem to care about your own survival.”

“Well then,” Loki says, shoulders braced and posture defensive, “if you are so perceptive, surely there is no need for me to explain. Have you truly never wanted to—to give up? To _stop_?”

“Of course not,” Rogers says, but suddenly he wonders.

Loki shakes his head. “Yes, I suppose a weapon never would question its purpose or its existence. You will sooner or later, you know; I think all living beings do.”

Rogers shrugs and releases the wheelchair. “Fine. Maybe. But you still haven’t told me why _you_ do.”

“Does it matter?” Loki asks sharply. “I am doing what you asked. There is no need for you to try to…understand me. Particularly when there is so much you are yet incapable of understanding.” He tries to grip the wheels again and stops short, his hands jerking back in pain.

Rogers sighs. “Just let me.” He gets another little box of milk from the kitchen, and while Loki drinks it, Rogers works on setting up the laptop for lack of anything better to do. “Now what,” he says when Loki finishes.

Loki sets the box on the side table. “Now I am going to sleep again, if I can, and perhaps regain enough energy to dig around in that locked-off brain of yours. Perhaps not. Perhaps you will simply have to…what is the phrase, ‘find yourself’?”

“How the hell am I supposed to do that?”

“You have heard of _the internet_ , yes?” Loki asks, his tone scathing.

Rogers stares at him. “That’s how you’re going to help me? Tell me to Google myself?”

“In case you’ve somehow already forgotten, I promised you nothing,” Loki says.

“You said you would _try_ ,” Rogers says. “I don’t even know where to start.”

Loki’s shoulder twitches in what Rogers supposes is meant to be a less painful shrug. “Begin with what you do know. HYDRA and the name ‘Rogers.’ It is at least worth a try, and perhaps you will learn something while I rest. Now, if you would—”

Rogers shakes his head but helps Loki out of the wheelchair and onto the couch, and then he settles himself in the stuffed chair and opens the laptop. He has no other ideas and he definitely can’t access secure HYDRA files from here, so he types Loki’s suggestion into the search bar. The results are immediate, and it’s not the links that draw his attention but the right side of the search page. “Steven Grant Rogers,” it says in large, bold letters, and under that in smaller type, “First Captain America.” Born: July 4, 1918, Brooklyn. Disappeared winter 1945, Germany (missing in action). Below that is a list of related names and faces: James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes, Margaret “Peggy” Carter, Abraham Erskine, Johann Schmidt, Howling Commandos, SHIELD, Howard Stark. By far the most jarring, however, is the cluster of images above the name, because they are all…him. The largest is a sepia-toned photograph of (Steven) Rogers in a WWII-era military dress uniform, smiling slightly at the camera. He looks young in a way Rogers can’t quite define, and there’s no hardness to his expression, no distance in his eyes. He’s clean-shaven, his hair much shorter and neatly combed, but Rogers has seen his own reflection often enough that the resemblance is unmistakable.

Loki glances at him from the couch where he is apparently trying to get comfortable, and Rogers turns the laptop toward him, still feeling a little off balance. He still doesn’t _remember_ anything, or at least he doesn’t think he does, but…that’s his face. And those other faces, those other names—once again, there is _something_ —

“Well,” Loki says after a moment. His gaze flicks to Rogers and back to the screen. “Correct me if I am wrong, but you look remarkably well preserved for a mortal who has lived nearly a century.”

“That can’t be right,” Rogers says. “I’m not…”

“Perhaps they had you in stasis much of the time,” Loki says, letting his eyes fall shut.

_Let’s put him on ice_ , Rogers thinks he remembers, and yes, there’s something familiar about this. Like the names and faces on the screen in front of him, familiar in a way he doesn’t understand, because he knows he doesn’t remember them.

And yet—

He knows them. Somehow. The same way he knows that Steven Grant Rogers is his name.

He clicks through to the Wikipedia article and begins reading. “Steven ‘Steve’ Grant Rogers was the first of two American soldiers to take up the title of Captain America and the only person on record to have made a successful transformation with Dr. Abraham Erskine’s supersoldier serum,” the article begins. “Rogers was instrumental in many Allied victories in Europe during the latter half of World War 2, aided by Agent Peggy Carter, Howard Stark, and the Howling Commandos. However, during a mission to capture HYDRA scientist Armin Zola, he fell from a train high up in the Alps, and his body was never recovered.” It is surreal. As Loki’s breathing evens out in sleep, Rogers keeps reading.

He learns that Steve Rogers’ death was kept quiet for morale reasons, and Captain America wasn’t allowed to die because he was too important to the war effort (and maybe more importantly, his death would’ve been an Axis victory). Instead, James “Bucky” Barnes primarily stepped into the role, with Peggy Carter providing major tactical and strategic support from the sidelines. Barnes wasn’t a supersoldier, but testing revealed moderately enhanced physical capabilities from whatever HYDRA did to him, and Howard Stark quickly got to work trying to supplement that with his vita-ray invention and experimental versions of the serum that wouldn’t produce such dramatic results but also didn’t carry the same danger of side effects. Some historians, the article tells him, speculate that this form of the serum was not as safe as Stark claimed after the fact in his reports, because his notes make clear that the process was rushed and he didn’t get approval from anyone before beginning. Stark never confirmed it, but there’s a popular theory that he and Barnes, both mourning their fallen friend, went ahead with the serum as a fairly reckless experiment because they wanted revenge on HYDRA. (A more modern theory takes this further, suggesting that Barnes’ apparent insistence on taking an untested serum might have stemmed from romantic attraction to Rogers. In fact, one film from just a few years ago portrays Rogers and Barnes as secret lovers. A much older theory, dating all the way back to the first feature-length dramatization of Captain America’s story in 1949, is that Carter and Rogers were lovers, despite Carter’s claims to the contrary. The real Rogers, reading all of this on a laptop with an alien asleep on his couch, has no idea what the truth might be.)

The new Captain America and his Commandos (and, more often than not, Agent Carter) continued destroying HYDRA bases, eventually uncovering a plot to take out numerous cities in one strike. Barnes was able to board the bomber but not to prevent it from taking off, and—presumably after subduing Schmidt—he was forced to ditch it in the water above the Arctic. Like the first Captain America, he was presumed dead but his body was never found, even though Stark put forth a major effort to find him and Rogers (and, possibly, a weapon in Schmidt’s possession that was never declassified).

Most of this information—nearly everything that didn’t show up in the propaganda reels—remained classified until a few years after the war, when the public finally learned that the Captain America who heroically sacrificed himself to save his country wasn’t the original. His story became even more popular after that, used to show the greatness and bravery of American soldiers against enemies like Nazis and now communism, the enduring power of the American spirit in the willingness of these young men to die for their country, and so on. The fact that HYDRA apparently dabbled in occult and pagan powers didn’t hurt the narrative of their darkness and evil withering in the face of a couple of God-fearing boys from Brooklyn.

The article details Rogers’ early life as a “frail, sickly youth” as well, including his growing up in poverty, losing his mother to tuberculosis, meeting Barnes, and developing his artistic skills. Then there’s a list of appearances and portrayals of Rogers in the media—early propaganda films, comics, and radio plays, and then a sensationalized and eventually debunked biography and accompanying film released almost immediately after some of the information was declassified. After that there seem to have been at least a few biographies, documentaries, and “docudramas” per decade, like a popular but semi-fictionalized TV miniseries in the early 1990s, a classic 1974 film starring Robert Redford, and a 1986 book (David McCullough’s _The Men Behind the Shield: The Lives of Captain America_ , which itself was eventually adapted into a History Channel documentary) widely held to be the definitive historical account of the Captain America story.

Rogers reads a few excerpts, watches a few video clips, somehow follows a trail of links that leads to a site called “Captains America: The Stucky RPF Archive” full of sexually explicit (and questionably accurate) fan-written stories about himself and Barnes. At that point he finally closes the laptop, feeling unsettled, and rubs at his aching eyes. Of course he wouldn’t know much about any of the books or films, although he vaguely recalls seeing ads for at least a couple of them, but the rest of it…he doesn’t remember any of that. He’s (nearly) sure he doesn’t. But the photos are unmistakably of his face, if not his smile, and even though he knows he (probably) doesn’t remember, he can’t deny a niggling sense of familiarity.

Loki stirs on the couch, catching Rogers’ attention. The alien is still asleep, but his expression is pinched, forehead creased with strain. As Rogers watches, he flinches against the back of the couch with a bitten-off sound of pain, his eyes flying open. His pupils are dilated, his gaze wild and unfocused, his breathing harsh.

“Easy,” Rogers says without thinking.

Loki jerks in place again, pulling his arms defensively inward. Rogers waits, grateful (why?) that the nightmare didn’t send Loki tumbling to the floor this time, and after a moment Loki blinks at him and seems to recognize his surroundings. He looks away and clears his throat. “How long…?”

Rogers glances at his watch. “Three hours, 27 minutes. Do you feel recovered?”

“Hah. No.” Loki hauls himself more or less upright and sags against the cushions. “But I think my _seidr_ is replenished enough to try to remove some of the barriers in your mind.” He hesitates. “Well—perhaps some food first.”

“Sure,” Rogers says. He’s hungry too, now that he thinks about it, and what he’s learned about the stranger with his face needs to settle in his mind a bit before he wants to stir up real memories. He heats up some tomato soup without really paying attention to anything he’s doing, black-and-white images still lingering behind his eyes. Stark is long dead, killed in a car accident with his wife in 1991, but Peggy Carter still lives, and he wonders if she remembers him. If she would recognize him, now. That’s an option, he supposes, if Loki’s magic doesn’t work. Except it kind of needs to, because all he has now is fragments of somebody else’s biography and the frustrating sense that the names and faces should all be more familiar than they really are.

Loki is watching him, he realizes, having somehow finished his soup first. Rogers gives himself a mental shake and takes both bowls back to the kitchen, then eases Loki back into the wheelchair. “You need me on the couch again?”

“The bed this time, I think,” Loki says. “This will be complicated, and more contact will help. My hands on both sides of your head,” he clarifies.

Rogers shrugs and wheels him into the bedroom, lining the wheelchair up where Loki directs him so Loki’s knees are touching the blankets. He sits on the bed then, an odd feeling in his stomach. “If this goes wrong,” he says. “What’s the worst-case scenario?”

Loki hesitates, so briefly that Rogers wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t been watching for it, and it’s enough to tell him that Loki doesn’t know. “Most likely,” he says, “if this does not work, nothing will happen at all. I am reestablishing old pathways, after all, not creating new ones. I suppose there may be…feedback, of some kind. But you may also want to consider whether you are asking the right question.”

“And what’s the right question?” Rogers asks.

“Consider if this works,” Loki says, “and the answers you find are not ones you can bear. Once you have that knowledge, you cannot give it back, and I cannot take it from you even if you wish it. HYDRA could, no doubt, but their methods are…” His lips thin. “Once you remember, you will not voluntarily submit to that again. And—is not this simpler? You are—who and what you are now. No doubts, no regrets, no past to drag you down. You could start over, unburdened.”

Rogers is already shaking his head before Loki finishes speaking. “I don’t have anything to start _from_. I don’t know who or what I am, and I want to know. I don’t—” It feels strange to say, but he knows it’s true as he says it. “I don’t like _not_ knowing things.”

Loki looks at him for a long moment. “If you are sure,” he says finally.

Rogers nods. “I’m sure.” He stretches out sideways on the bed, deliberately relaxing the tension in his limbs. Loki’s fingers settle against his temples again, the roughness of the bandage making an odd contrast to his faintly cool skin.

“There is one other thing,” Loki says. “Whatever memories you recover, I may be able to see as well.”

Rogers shrugs, which probably looks a little strange when he’s flat on his back, but he’s sure Loki understands his meaning. As far as the privacy of his own memories goes, he really doesn’t care about that—maybe he should, and maybe he will later, but right now he doesn’t even know what’s inside his own head or what he might not want someone else to see. The idea of someone else seeing that unknown quantity as well doesn’t really bother him.

As before, he feels nothing at first, hears nothing but the background hum of the air conditioning and the very slightly unsteady rhythm of Loki’s breathing. And then, with no sense of gradual buildup or warning, he is not alone in his own head. There is no other way to describe it, and nothing he has experienced that compares. It’s not an intrusion, not an attack; there is no sense of anyone prying open a door or chipping away at the walls of his mind—he is just no longer the only presence behind his own eyes.

Loki’s presence is distinct, and Rogers doesn’t have the language to describe it or even understand it (and he has no idea, when he thinks about it, if he just doesn’t have the memories to compare it to anything, or if there aren’t human words for something so far outside of normal human experience). He knows, though, that it doesn’t hurt, and it doesn’t feel like a violation. He is sure of that much. He isn’t sure why he suddenly expects both of those things so strongly, isn’t sure he wants to know, and a shiver of unease prickles down his spine when he realizes that if this works, he will know why, and very soon.

But he still wants to know who he was. _Needs_ to know.

He holds very still and focuses on the breath going steadily in and out of his nose, spreads his hand against the blanket for something tactile and grounding. Inside, on a completely new level of awareness, he feels…Loki is taking a look around, much the way Rogers automatically maps out paths and exits when he enters a room, except Loki’s attention feels more like detached observation than tactical assessment. Examination without judgment. It’s almost gentle and not really intrusive, and he doesn’t know why that seems so odd.

Nothing else happens for a little while, long enough that Rogers starts to wonder if this is it, whatever Loki’s trying just isn’t going to work and he’ll have to try something else or take Loki’s advice and start over from scratch (unless Loki’s only pretending right now and not actually trying to fix anything, and in that case the simplest way to motivate him to cooperate is obvious—except now the thought of deliberately hurting someone who’s already so injured makes him feel uncomfortably cold inside).

And then something _shifts_.

* * *

[ ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5110214)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Did you catch the unsubtle Dollhouse reference? (Reference. Not a direct quote, just because the actual quote didn't work as well.) Partly I just like sticking references to other fandoms in my fic, but also I couldn't think of anything better.
> 
> 2\. In the same way that anything from Loki's perspective isn't just me character-bashing, I'm also not trying to mock Steve/Bucky as a pairing. It just seemed reasonable to me, based on what I know of fandom, that a) in-world Captains America RPF would exist, with varying levels of both porniness and historical accuracy, and b) any of the real people involved, if they happened to come across such fic, would find this pretty damn weird. And uh, if it didn't even occur to you until now that I might be poking fun at Steve/Bucky, please ignore my paranoid over-explaining.
> 
> 3\. If you've been enjoying this, please leave me a comment! I kind of live for those.
> 
> **Up next:** Results of telepathic nonsense. Loki and Steve both have a bad afternoon.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Chapter-specific warnings:** telepathic nonsense, violence, references to canonical character deaths, dehumanization, Loki, beginning of mildly pretentious chapter epigraphs

_All this that is more than a wish is a memory_  
_All this that is ceases to be_  
_All is revealed_  
_The obvious door opens nothing_  
_Nothing, nothing, nothing left_  
_Nothing left to chance_  
_\- "Ending Start," Metric_

For a fraction of a second, it actually does feel like something he can understand: the pieces of a gun slotting smoothly together after he has finished cleaning them, the moment a target comes into focus down the sights of a sniper rifle, the feeling when a lock he’s picking clicks into true. For another fraction of a second he can _feel_ it, just like Loki described, all the little branching pathways suddenly opening up with light and color, expanding, unfurling.

And then it’s the first deep breath with lungs that actually work the way they’re supposed to, and his dim surprise—through the lingering dizziness and exhaustion of Howard Stark’s machine—that people without asthma feel like _this_ all the time. Opening his eyes to perfect sharp color everywhere and thinking what this would do for his art before remembering he’s a soldier now, not an artist. The feel of his shield slapping back into his hand on a perfect rebound. Glass shattering almost painlessly around him as he misjudges his new size and mass and crashes through a shopfront window. The first time he saw Peggy, and the way she looked at him like he was _worth_ looking at when no one else did. Erskine, actually believing he could be more than a skinny little guy with a big mouth (and dying for it). Diving for the dummy grenade at camp with the thought _well, I was always gonna die young_ flashing half-formed through his head. His mom, exhausted, falling asleep at the kitchen table, and him too much of a scrawny weakling to carry her to bed like he should, so he’d just cover her with a blanket. His mom, and the way she breathed at the very end, so slow and shallow that at first he didn’t even realize when she went. The showgirls and the stupid skit they performed until he was hearing it in his sleep (“And those are your only two options? A lab rat or a dancing monkey?”). Bucky. Oh god, Bucky, “I’m with you till the end of the line,” the only guy who had his back in so many of those stupid fights he got himself into, the only one who thought sticking up to bullies for a stick-thin brat was worth his time. Bucky, more handsome than ever in his uniform, and him watching with a dizzying combination of pride for his friend and jealousy. Bucky in the HYDRA base (a dark-haired man, injured, on a table in a HYDRA lab), awareness slowly returning to his eyes, a mumbled “I thought you were smaller.” Schmidt tearing off his own face. The Howling Commandos, his _friends_ , men who followed not just Captain America but Steve Rogers. Fire. Violent blue light.

The train. Metal giving way, _falling_ , Bucky’s horrified face above him, hands grasping at empty air. Falling. Landing. Cold and darkness, and then voices, Zola’s face above him. Lashing out and finding himself unable to move. Cold again, bone-deep and suffocating, a long stretch of cold dark nothing. A machine, metal clamped to his head, something in his mouth, _pain_. Zola again, the one he’d underestimated, the scurrying little scientist in Schmidt’s shadow (the one who’d succeeded where Schmidt hadn’t, the one who made a mockery of everything he now knows Peggy and Howard created). Cold and dark and pain and pain and everything ripped away from him, and then the razor clarity of his missions, punctuated by more cold, more pain. His finger on the trigger, calm and still and patient, over and over again—for HYDRA, for the KGB, for HYDRA-within-SHIELD. Target acquired. Target eliminated. Acceptable levels of collateral damage. Names, faces, _oh god I killed_ —

He is Steve Rogers is Captain America is the Winter Soldier is the asset is—

He remembers, and he doesn’t know who he is.

He is still falling—

He is still falling, stars fading to nothing as the Void draws him in, and everything is going numb, tears freezing to his face as he falls into cold dark nothing, and the cold dark nothing bites into his body and his mind but even that cannot make him stop seeing their faces, Thor’s horrified (why) as he opens his hand, Odin’s still grave and saddened and so very disappointed, and as the Bifrost dwindles to nothing above/below/behind him he cannot stop hearing Thor, begging ( _why_ ), “Loki, _no_ ,” and Odin, quieter but so much more devastating, “No, Loki”—

_—what?_

_—these aren’t mine—_

Rogers tries to jerk away, feels Loki doing the same, feels the spike of his own alarm and of Loki’s, but something is tangled, _falling cold dark pain_ , and his body is very distant, and now the images/thoughts/feelings flickering through his mind almost too quick to grasp aren’t his memories but Loki’s.

He sees/hears/feels—

_—he is cold and alone and afraid and so very small, and he doesn’t understand—_

_—he is older, and he has a protector now,_ Thor, brother _, but he dreams of being cold and alone, and of monsters in the dark, and he still doesn’t understand—and then he learns about the beasts called Jotnar and thinks he does understand, and he is still more afraid, and only Thor’s earnest promises_ (“I’ll slay every last one of those monsters before I let a single one of them hurt you!”) _can calm him after his worst nightmares—_

 _—he is older still, and Thor is yet his protector, but he watches Thor make friends with an ease that baffles him. He worries, and so he tries to make friends of his own, but he doesn’t know_ how _, and it is even more difficult when his ability to spend time with other children is repeatedly hindered by the feverish sickness that so often lays him low during Asgard’s hot summers and that seems to strike no one else at all—_

 _—he is much older, and he has learned to protect himself, because Thor is too busy with his training and his friends, and Loki has begun to understand that he is only the spare, loved by Frigga and perhaps Thor but only tolerated by everyone else, his ever-increasing mastery of_ seidr _viewed not with pride or appreciation or awe but suspicion and disdain (even Thor, in front of his own friends, dismisses Loki’s abilities as mere tricks)—has begun to understand that he is not like Thor, cannot be like Thor, and so he is nothing—_

— _he is almost a man and he has long known himself to be an outcast, weaker and smaller than an Asgardian warrior is supposed to be, scorned for his shortcomings when he tried to be what was expected, distrusted or mocked as a coward when he began to rely on speed and trickery and magic rather than brute force. He no longer cares what Asgard thinks, what the nobles think, what Thor’s friends think. He is cleverer than all of them, sly and quiet and observant and underestimated, and it has been a long time since anyone has cornered him in the training yards as an easy target and sent him to the healing halls again (longer still since he believed he could rely on Thor to protect him). He does not care that Odin shows little interest in his magecraft or his subtle maneuvering to smooth over messes that Thor’s temper and impulsiveness often create, or that he is so easy to forget except when he makes himself impossible to ignore. He is content to remain in the shadows for now, because that is where he chooses to be, and someday he will_ show them _, and Asgard will understand his value. He tells himself these things, so often and for so long that he almost believes them, except at night when he wakes from nightmares or cannot sleep at all and he is so alone he thinks he will be sick with it—_

 _—he is a man, if only just, and Thor is to be crowned—he is not ready, everyone should be able to see that, but they are all blinded by love of their golden prince, and Loki knows no one will listen, knows he has to show them (knows he has to stop this or consign himself to eternity in his brother’s shadow and the inescapable knowledge that despite everything he is_ not good enough _, in the eyes of all Asgard and of his father), knows he has to act now—_

 _—he is in battle on Jotunheim, his arm turning blue in the monster’s grip, and everything is falling apart, and through the fury and confusion and panic a little voice in the back of his head is saying_ yes, this explains everything _—_

 _—he is king, and he has this_ one chance _to show Father that he is worthy, and so he will wipe out all the monsters and finish what Odin started so long ago, and he will do it without risking a single Asgardian life in war, because he can do this for Asgard and for his family (for himself, to prove that he is good for something even though he is not Thor, to show everyone that he is a true Asgardian and_ not a monster _, because if he destroys the monsters he cannot be one of them and no one else will ever have to know what lurks under his skin), because he_ is not _fated to bring only ruin even though he cannot forget how Father collapsed as Loki shouted at him—_

 _—he is watching as the humans scatter before him like ants, fury boiling up inside him at Thor’s friends who have decided to commit treason simply because they do not want to_ give him a chance _, at Thor himself for commanding such loyalty and_ love _that no one is willing to see if Loki is good for_ anything _, and so he sends the Destroyer through the pitiful little desert town, and even as a banished mortal Thor is_ still better _and in his rage Loki strikes out and Thor dies, his weak human body_ dies _and Loki cannot think past a dizzying combination of stunned triumph and horrified shock—_

 _—he is fighting Thor on the Bifrost, Thor who has changed and grown after only three days in the company of a few mortals when he has not listened to his_ brother _for_ centuries _—Thor, the hypocrite, “You can’t destroy an entire race!” as if he hadn’t desired exactly that just days ago, but Loki has come too far to change his course now and so he refuses to feel the sudden flicker of unease that the Jotnar cannot all be warriors—_

— _he is lost, knows he is lost, wants nothing more than to be_ done _, and so he lets go_ —

— _he is falling—_

_—he is pinned to a table, flayed open and exposed for Midgardian scientists to study, and even as he cannot understand why the Norns will not let him die, he knows that this is what monsters are good for (kinslayer, destroyer of worlds, monster among monsters), and it is no more than he deserves—_

It’s Loki who manages to wrench away first, and Rogers is suddenly back on the bed in his little Bethesda apartment, scrambling to sit up and put his back to the wall. He stares at Loki, breathing hard. “What the _hell_ was _that_?”

Loki’s hand moves up aimlessly toward his own temple and then back down again with a wince, his fingers visibly trembling. He looks at least as shaken as Rogers feels. “I…may have misjudged…”

“You _think_?” Rogers snaps. He realizes he’s shaking too, but he doesn’t know if it’s anger or just reaction. It’s easier to be angry at Loki than to think about—anything he’s just learned. “I thought you said if it went wrong, _nothing would happen_. That was a whole lot more than _nothing_.”

Loki focuses on him, his eyes narrowing. “I’m so terribly sorry my memories were _inconvenient_ for you. I did tell you I was not practiced at mind magic, and you insisted. Do not forget that.”

Rogers sputters out an incredulous laugh. “For once, _forgetting_ is not the problem. Why the hell did I see your memories? I’ve got enough to deal with in my head now, I didn’t need your baggage too.”

A twitchy shrug. “I can only guess that…there were enough points of similarity…I lost control of the magic. It should not have happened.”

“No shit,” Rogers says. His heart is pounding, and he _has_ to hold onto this anger. “‘Points of similarity.’ I’m nothing like you.” He wants Loki to snap back, he realizes as he says it, wants to goad the other man into a fight.

Instead Loki looks away, even his brief irritation seeming to drain out and leave him empty. “No. I imagine not. Did you at least find what you were looking for?”

“Did I—” He snaps his mouth shut, but it’s too late, just that question is enough to yank his own memories back to the forefront of his mind. “I was Captain America, I was a symbol, I was supposed to be _good_ , and they—and _I_ —” He remembers Howard and Maria, remembers a car on a dark road, thinks he might be sick. Remembers what Erskine died to create. “‘Not a perfect soldier but a good man.’ Oh, god.”

“Well, I suppose succeeding in one out of two is not so terrible,” Loki murmurs, and somehow that’s what does it. The fury comes roaring back, everything the asset acted on but couldn’t feel, and before he can think he’s on his feet, slamming Loki and his wheelchair against the near wall hard enough to crack the plaster. Loki’s head snaps back with a pained grunt, and then Rogers is looming over him, hands white-knuckled on the wheelchair’s arms, breathing hard and wanting to _destroy_ something (someone), and all he can think is _how_ dare _you laugh at this—_

But Loki isn’t laughing, he’s pressed into the back of the chair looking up at Rogers warily (and then an awful hope starts to enter his expression, and Rogers _really_ doesn’t want to think about what that means), and the truth hits Rogers like a blow to the gut. This is the answer to all his questions; this is what he is now. Whatever and whoever he used to be, today he’s somebody who will threaten a guy in a wheelchair who’s so wounded from a year of torture that he can barely move.

He lets go and backs away, Loki still watching him, and when Loki opens his mouth to speak, Rogers turns around and leaves the room nearly at a run. He doesn’t stop when he reaches the front door, just locks it behind himself and takes the stairs to the building’s roof, because he can’t be trapped in that little apartment with himself and all these memories a second longer.

* * *

For a long moment, Loki just stares at the bedroom doorway as if Rogers is going to come right back, even though he knows the other man has left the apartment. Everything inside him seems to have gone numb.

It should not hurt, after everything, for Rogers to reject him too. He should have at last reached the point of having nothing left to lose. It hurts anyway, an ache somewhere deep inside and a sickness in his gut—and a dull anger at himself for believing he might deserve anything more. Of course Rogers does not want him, now that he understands what Loki is and what he has done. Of course he would be so disgusted by Loki’s craven desire to be _finished_ that he would refuse to grant him that mercy once he regained all his faculties.

But he’d thought…seeing Rogers’ memories, feeling his helpless anger against his bullies, his frustration at the treacherous weakness of his own body, his illnesses, his bone-deep awareness of being _less_ , the fall, the dark, the cold, everything that broke the magic away from Loki’s grasp and turned a simple link into a two-way flood…it wasn’t supposed to happen, but he never would have lost control if Rogers’ memories hadn’t mirrored so many of his own fears and failures and inadequacies back to him. And just for a moment, he’d thought—if Rogers understood these things, in a way no one else ever has, perhaps he would understand Loki himself. Would not hate him, as everyone does eventually.

He should not be surprised, he supposes. He is a monster, he has always been a monster even when he naively believed himself a person, so it is fitting that Rogers would only be repulsed by what he saw when Loki accidentally bared his soul to him.

He lowers his hands to the chair’s wheels, clenches his teeth, and forces himself to grip hard enough to move forward. He doesn’t go far, though, stopping next to the couch in the front room and turning a blank gaze on the apartment door. He has no idea what to do next. Rogers could come back, but there is no reason at all for him to do so. The laptop is still here, and the knife Loki kept, but even these things are easily replaced if he does not want to deal with Loki any longer. He certainly needs nothing Loki can offer him. And without him, Loki can…what? Stay here until he heals? He has no idea how long it will be before he is reasonably functional again, but the extent and severity of his injuries and the weakened state of his body and _seidr_ all point to quite some time before he is able to move about as he wishes. Until then, simply taking care of his own basic needs will range from difficult to impossible, and he will not be able to acquire more food when he runs out.

And all of this is a best-case scenario (as Rogers might say, he realizes). The chances of HYDRA leaving him in peace long enough to recover fully—or even to recover past the point of near helplessness—are slim at best. He does not expect Rogers to turn him over (he is a little surprised to realize he does not expect this, considering it would be a tidy way for Rogers to be rid of him, but with his memories restored Rogers probably hates HYDRA even more than Loki does…and it does not seem like the sort of thing he would do). He is less certain that this supposed safehouse is entirely secure and that HYDRA will not find him here. If nothing else, his time on Midgard has taught him a great deal about the ingenuity and persistence of the humans Asgard still believes to be primitive.

So he has…a few days, perhaps—a little more if he can scrape together enough magic to lay out some decent misdirection spells, which he is not at all confident he will be able to do. Enough to make a little progress in his healing, especially if he husbands his _seidr_ very carefully and directs it toward the most critical areas while still leaving a bit left over. But he will have to leave soon—if he waits until HYDRA agents come for him, it will be far too late—and he has neither anywhere to go nor any way to get there.

Once again, he has nothing.

_Well, Allfather, you were right about one thing—exile to Midgard is indeed profoundly humbling, though perhaps not in the way you expected. I can only imagine how quickly you would have called Thor home if you saw him subjected to even a fraction of what I have experienced._

He almost wants to laugh, might do so if not for the awful hollowness in his chest. Now he is truly being foolish. How can he still feel that twist of bitterness over the Allfather’s obvious favoritism? It is hardly favoritism to prefer one’s own son over a pet monster, hardly injustice to take no interest in the fate of a Jotun runt after it has proved itself useless.

A quiet noise breaks into his thoughts: the click of a lock releasing. And then the door bursts open and black-clad HYDRA soldiers swarm into the apartment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Up next:** Loki continues to have a bad day. (lol no I'm not giving you anything more specific)


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Chapter-specific warnings:** a lot more violence than previous chapters, Holocaust mention, a couple racial slurs in a historical context, more telepathic nonsense

_When you try to see, we'll watch you_  
_When you try to leave, we'll keep you_  
_When you should be dreaming, we'll wake you_  
_But don't scream, we'll make you swallow your words_  
_\- "Ending Start," Metric_

They will not, _will not_ take him again, he will die first, he will make them kill him if he cannot take them down—

He has enough magic left for a single burst of power, and when he sees electricity crackling down the shafts of the batons they hold, feels ozone and static gathering like a thundercloud around the same guns they used to incapacitate him before, _tastes_ the drugs in the vials they carry, he knows what he will do with it. He doesn’t have the strength to destroy them all, but at least he can take their drugs and lightning-powered weapons out of the equation.

He draws everything inward to a central point and _shoves_ , and it feels like something vital has gone out of him (like hands tearing out his insides) and his vision nearly blanks out. But he sees sparks exploding from their weapons, sees two of the agents drop their batons with a curse, and he feels a tiny flare of satisfaction that at least they cannot take him this way, harmlessly and at a distance. In close combat, he has a chance.

He curls his hand around the hilt of Rogers’ knife, forcing himself to ignore the pain splintering through his bones. He will bear any pain now if it means they will not take him back.

One of the agents makes a rush for him, formerly electrified baton raised to use as a club, and Loki wrenches back on one wheel to turn the chair sideways and slam into his opponent’s knees. The agent staggers, and before he can recover, Loki jams the blade up under his arm where he has no protection—yanks it back out and slams his elbow into another agent’s groin on the backswing, stabs down at the first agent’s thigh.

And then the wheelchair goes slewing over sideways as an agent jerks it off balance, and Loki is thrown to the floor. He feels an almost-healed finger snap on impact, but the pain rattling up all his bones is nothing compared to the rush of choking terror that floods him.

_No, no no no—_

He shoves himself over, lashing out with the knife and catching the arm of the agent reaching for him, kicks out and feels bones grind together as he smashes his heel into the agent’s face plate. A boot slams down toward his face and he jerks aside, buries the knife to its hilt in the back of the agent’s knee, uses the man’s momentum to grip and _twist_ and finally, a bone that isn’t his gives way as the agent tumbles to the floor—

Jagged pain erupts in his chest as his damaged lungs start to seize. Loki curls in on himself, convulsing, the knife torn from his grasp, and this time he can’t stop the hands twisting his arm up and back, the boot crushing the bones of his knife hand, the colossal blow of an agent driving his heel into Loki’s back between his shoulder blades. His shoulder is wrenched from its socket, a shout of pain ripped from his throat. More hands pull his leg sideways, the one that is still badly broken, and something _slams_ into the side of his knee and he feels the bone shatter.

He cannot fight them. Of course he cannot. They have spent an entire year learning how to hurt him and weaken him and cripple him without killing him. They know exactly where all the cracks are.

“Get away,” he gasps, “ _get away_ ,” _please no no don’t I can’t_ —

A hand clamps down over his jaw, something stretchy sealing tight over his nose and mouth, like all those times back in the laboratory, and a spike of panic drives away even the tiny bit of air remaining to him. There are hands, everywhere, so many hands, the sparking pain of broken bones, what feels like a giant’s fingers around his chest squeezing and crushing and his ribs are cracking and his lungs won’t inflate and he _can’t breathe_ and he is not going to die. They will never let him die. They will drag him back into hell and tear him apart over and over again for nothing more than their own curiosity and he _cannot do this_.

He cannot breathe. He cannot free himself. He cannot stop them.

_No, please—please…_

* * *

It’s cooler up here on the roof, the breeze whipping through Rogers’ hair, and for a moment he only stands still and breathes. He just—he just needs to think, find some kind of equilibrium, and then…well, he’s not naïve enough to think he can somehow go right back to being Steve Rogers and everything will be fine, but if nothing else, he needs to stabilize so he’s not taking this out on Loki. Who has done some awful things, but who also warned him against this, after all, and who was only doing what Rogers asked him to.

Who is probably still hoping Rogers will come back and finish him off.

He sits down abruptly on the roof’s gritty surface, feeling nauseated. His own memories feel raw, like an exposed nerve, but thinking about Loki’s memories is almost as bad, and his mind shies away from both.

He was Captain America. He was the Winter Soldier. He’s neither now, and he _has_ to figure out where that leaves him.

Where the hell does he even _start_?

And now that he has his answers…what does he want?

Well, he _wants_ for none of this to have happened. He wants to have stayed on the train with Bucky and stayed Captain America and taken down Schmidt without anybody needing to dump a plane into the ice and maybe actually gone on a date with Peggy. He wants, a whole hell of a lot, to have never been taken by HYDRA and turned into the Winter Soldier. And the things he really wants aren’t things he can have, because there’s no way to change what’s already happened. (Unless there is, unless Loki knows about some kind of magic that can turn back time—but no, he would’ve used that himself by now if such a thing existed.)

So Rogers can’t somehow stop having been the Winter Soldier. He can’t even pick up where he left off and pretend it never happened, because the world now is almost unrecognizable compared to what he remembers. His Brooklyn doesn’t exist anymore, not really, and everyone he knew…

He can’t go back. He can’t be Captain America again, and he won’t be the Winter Soldier. He has no idea how to go forward, or even whether he _should_ , because the things he’s done—things that, yes, HYDRA made him do, but it was still his finger on the trigger, his hands and strength and reflexes that served HYDRA’s goals—can’t just be brushed aside. The people he killed personally are still dead, and so are the people who died in the wars he helped start, and the weight of it is too much but rejecting all responsibility is almost worse because that means he really was a mindless weapon, not a person, and if HYDRA could so easily turn him into a _thing_ , what the hell is he now?

And then there’s Loki, who temporarily killed his brother and permanently killed his birth father before attempting genocide against his own race. Rogers doesn’t know what to think—or feel—about that, but it’s marginally easier right now than trying to think about himself. He knows Loki didn’t deliberately kill Thor; knows, as much as Loki did, that a similar blow from the Destroyer would have barely injured any Aesir, especially one as strong as Thor. If Loki had blasted his brother with the Odinforce instead, Thor probably would’ve stayed dead. As for the rest of Puente Antiguo, Loki has no idea whether there were casualties, so Rogers doesn’t either, and he wishes he’d thought to read up on the incident back at HYDRA. Maybe a lot of civilians died. Maybe nobody did.

(Rogers knows he’s killed civilians. He doesn’t want to remember their faces.)

As for Jotunheim, and Loki’s attempt to destroy an entire _planet_ … Steve Rogers, at least, is human enough to be a little horrified, but he also learned enough about racism that Rogers can recognize it now in the way Asgard views the Jotnar. He remembers the propaganda posters of subhuman Japs and Krauts killing women and children, how even before he went to Europe and met actual Germans he thought it was disgusting, acting like your enemies weren’t really people so it was easier to hate them and kill them. He remembers learning about the death camps and how the Nazis used the exact same tactics to convince ordinary people that all their Jewish neighbors were _untermensch_. He can imagine how a war like the one between Asgard and Jotunheim would color the way each race thought of the other, how Loki could grow up convinced the members of another race weren’t even people, and he can see it with a lot less bias than Loki can.

Laufey probably deserved what happened to him, considering he tried to assassinate Odin, but even he was obviously a person, and there _had_ to be civilian Jotnar. Kids, even, since after all Loki was found as a baby. Hell, Loki himself seems pretty normal, and Rogers has serious doubts that Loki’s only a person because he grew up away from the planet of his birth. Still, Rogers can barely get his mind around the level of destruction Loki attempted. The only genocidal dictator he knows anything about is Hitler, but that’s not a fair comparison, is it? Loki is… a bit more like a kid who grew up in Nazi Germany in a perfect little Aryan family, maybe, being taught practically from birth that Jews were subhuman, and then learned as an adult that he was adopted and Jewish and his actually Aryan parents hadn’t done a thing to teach him his own people were human. The best reaction would be to realize how wrong all the Nazi rhetoric was and try to work against it, but if you were still pretty young, and you were scared, and you didn’t want anyone to know because then maybe they’d turn on you too—

Well, it would be easy to double down on your ingrained prejudice and become even more dedicated to stamping out the supposedly lesser race, because if you were working to destroy them, no one would ever think you were one of them, and you’d be safe. It would be easy to lash out at everyone else around you, too, everyone who lied to you or represented that perfect ideal you’d never be able to reach, everyone even remotely connected to the way you’d just had your whole identity destroyed—and if other people got caught in the crossfire, not necessarily monsters but definitely unimportant because you’d always been taught that too, would you even notice? It’s not a very compassionate or praiseworthy reaction, certainly, but it’s…understandable. Human. And he realizes abruptly that he can’t hate Loki for any of it, even in an abstract way.

Hate him for throwing Rogers’ mind into this much turmoil, maybe, which is awful and unfair of him, but he’s feeling _way too much_ and it’s all going to overwhelm him if he can’t direct it somewhere. _Consider if this works_ , he remembers Loki telling him, _and the answers you find are not ones you can bear_ , and the suggestion that only HYDRA would be able to take the memories back again, and he shivers. He’s sure about that, if he’s sure about nothing else: going back and _asking_ for that is not an option. If HYDRA tries to scrape out his soul again and turn him back into a husk only capable of completing the missions they assign him, he will go down fighting first.

With that realization, somehow, his breathing gets a little easier, because he might not know what to do but he _does_ have choices again, and he’s just made one, drawn a very firm line between what is and isn’t acceptable. He’s chosen, definitively, against HYDRA. That’s something.

A wave of panic slams into him out of nowhere, so strong and sudden that Rogers actually jerks in place. For half a second he thinks it’s something out of his memories, delayed reaction to things he’s only just remembered, or worse there are wires crossed in the mess of his mind and his emotions will always be out of sync with reality. But it feels a little removed, too, like—like the way he felt watching soldiers onscreen was an impossibly distant cousin to the feeling of real combat—

—like it’s not _his_ , and then the fear seems to take shape, fragmented images of HYDRA soldiers in full tactical gear in Rogers’ apartment, and it isn’t Rogers’ fear but he recognizes it as if it were, because he felt exactly this just a few minutes ago. It’s Loki’s. He’s feeling _Loki’s_ panic, even though the mind-magic that restored his memories is supposed to be over.

Because they’re still linked. He can feel it now, a tenuous connection at the back of his mind, on the same bizarre new level of awareness at which he’d experienced Loki’s mental presence. They didn’t just get a compressed version of each other’s life histories, they’re _still linked_ , and he is feeling and seeing what Loki is feeling and seeing at this very moment.

For a split second Rogers just stares, his entire mind seeming stuck at _magic, what the ever-loving hell, how do I get myself into these things_ , and then the asset’s instincts take over, accepting the questions and setting them aside for now as the least important part of the current situation. _Why_ and _how_ aren’t relevant to figuring out how to respond in a crisis, and the asset was always very good at prioritizing, at reducing a problem to its component parts free of anything extraneous. All the uncertainty about his past and future go the same way, more or less neatly blocked off for later, where they won’t distract him. (The surge of unease when he realizes he’s grateful for some part of the asset’s conditioning—that can wait too. Right now, he needs the asset’s razor-sharp focus.)

So: HYDRA is here. _How_ isn’t immediately relevant, whatever Rogers knows about his own ability to lose a tail. _Why_ is obvious: to retrieve him and Loki. His basic options, too, are obvious: they’ve found Loki and they haven’t reached Rogers yet, almost certainly don’t know he’s received some kind of psychic early warning, so he’ll have a head start and a decent chance at getting away clean if he leaves now while they recapture Loki. Or he can stay and fight, and risk HYDRA taking him too.

Even as thinks it, he’s getting up and moving toward the edge of the roof, plotting out the placement of the balconies below him and matching them up in his head to his mental map of his floor and the building as a whole. Three floors away is easy. He plants one foot on the roof’s lip, calculates angle and distance, and jumps—catches himself quickly on the railing directly below him and to the left, reverses, launches himself at the balcony across and down. There’s definitely a memory of something an awful lot like this in one of HYDRA’s bases, everything collapsing in flames around him, but he keeps it safely back with everything else. Still not relevant.

Rogers lands lightly on the correct balcony and steps aside where he’s not likely to be seen—if anyone inside is paying attention, which doesn’t seem likely either. Loki’s terror and desperation are still hammering at the back of his mind, and he forces down those emotions too, taking a deliberate moment to assess what he can see of the situation through the gaps in the curtains. Ten STRIKE agents are in the front room, all dressed in black, with body armor and faceplates; two are already down, both bleeding profusely, one with a visibly broken leg. The others are clustered together, punching and kicking somebody on the floor. For a second he can’t even see Loki in the press of bodies, but there’s only one person they would be attacking.

One of the agents moves aside to avoid a kick from his victim, and Rogers sees that Loki’s mostly on his side, trying to curl inward in a vain attempt to protect himself because there’s not much else he _can_ do—one leg is clearly broken again, left shoulder dislocated, and as Rogers watches, one of the agents slams his heel into Loki’s ribs, exactly where the worst fractures and the giant incision are. Loki doubles up, his head finally coming into view, and Rogers sees why he hasn’t heard so much as a cry of pain from him: there’s a rubbery mask over his nose and mouth, similar in shape to what Rogers himself often wears on missions, except his always let him breathe freely. The one on Loki’s face is skin-tight and air-tight, suffocating him, and above the mask his eyes are wide and panicked.

Rogers feels his muscles winding tight in reaction and preparation. Even if he maybe didn’t make a conscious decision, he’s known what he was going to do since he started down here, that he can’t ignore Loki and leave him to HYDRA’s complete lack of mercy no matter what he’s done, definitely can’t ignore the painful terror still battering at the back of his own mind, but actually seeing it—Loki crippled and badly outnumbered and clearly trying his damnedest to fight anyway, and the agents not just working to subdue him but to hurt him again, _break_ him again, because they’ve spent an entire year studying him and _vivisecting_ him and now they’re putting that knowledge to use—

The surge of protective fury startles him with its ferocity, because he hasn’t felt it—hasn’t been able to feel it—in decades, and finally something inside him feels _right_. He’s not Captain America anymore and he’s barely Steve Rogers but yes, he’s still going to throw himself on the side of the little guy, still going to help, because this is what he does and it’s what he _wants_ to do.

(And Loki’s had his entire world ripped away from him, just like Rogers has, and so…maybe they need each other. And Rogers wants, actually, to have a chance to—well, to get to know Loki properly, not as a nearly mindless soldier meeting a broken test subject, and not in a dizzying clash of magic-propelled memories that seems to have been mostly a highlights reel anyway. Somewhere beneath all that pain and anger and despair is a wickedly smart guy Rogers thinks he might even be able to like, and he’ll never get to find out if he doesn’t stop HYDRA from taking Loki now.)

For half a second he almost reaches for the shield on his back that should be there but isn’t, and then he backs up to the railing and launches himself in a somersault through the glass door. It shatters around him, stinging cuts on his face and hands, but he barely notices, flinging away the curtain and snatching up the lamp as he rolls to his feet. The two nearest agents are halfway through a quick turn toward him when Rogers swings the lamp, taking one out at the knees and catching the other in the groin. He ducks a baton strike, catches another agent’s baton with the lamp cord and yanks it toward himself, and then he really wades in.

The agents are good and they’re all armed with something, but Rogers is better. He’s falling back on instinct instead of letting himself think about it, so he fights with the speed, strength, and grace of Captain America and the intensity and single-minded focus of the Winter Soldier, and even STRIKE isn’t enough in the face of that combination. It’s not long before all the agents are scattered around him, either dead or unconscious, leaving only Loki staring up at him in shock. He’s managed to scrape the mask down a little and is sucking in heaving breaths through his nose, but his left arm is limp and useless, and his other hand is shaking as he struggles with the mask, most of his fingers swollen or twisted.

“Hang on, let me get it,” Rogers says. He crouches, finds the clasp at the back of Loki’s head, and breaks it open, and Loki slumps back, gasping.

Rogers glances around the room, assessing again (Captain America was good at this too, as a combat soldier, but the Winter Soldier is good at making it dispassionate, compartmentalizing, which he still needs). None of the agents are moving yet, so he rights Loki’s wheelchair where it’s lying nearby and pulls it over. Loki’s bleeding in several places, especially from the obviously reopened incision in his chest, but at least he doesn’t look more seriously injured than he already was in the lab, and based on that, none of his new injuries are life-threatening (of course not, because HYDRA wanted their test subject back more or less in one piece, and that thought brings back some of the anger that he really doesn’t have time for yet). They’re going to need better mobility, though.

“I want to fix your shoulder,” he says. “Okay?”

Loki glances at him, still breathing like he’s just come in from the world’s hardest PT run, and dips his chin a little. Rogers reaches for him, hesitates. “This is going to hurt like the devil. I’ll make it as quick as I can.”

Loki huffs out a laugh and lets his head roll to the side. “I know.”

Rogers takes hold of Loki’s arm as gently as he can and _shoves_ , and the joint pops back into its socket. Loki jerks, his breath audibly hitching, and Rogers _feels_ it, not the actual pain of Loki’s shoulder but something like an echo of it. Loki’s gaze snaps to his, eyes widening, and there’s a surreal moment where he can feel Loki reacting to Rogers’ reaction to Loki’s pain and the mutual recognition of this bizarre new link.

—and then a coughing fit seizes him and he curls up, wheezing. Lung damage. Right. Not much they can do about that now. Rogers helps him sit up so he can breathe a little better and supports him through several tearing coughs that are probably just shy of bringing up blood.

When the fit finally passes, he helps Loki into the wheelchair. Loki hunches inward, avoiding his gaze, so Rogers leaves him to catch his breath while he checks on the agents. Two of them are dead, one from a broken neck and the other probably from a blunt-force head injury, and Rogers can’t bring himself to feel too upset about that. He killed plenty of HYDRA soldiers during the war, after all. The others are only unconscious, and he uses their own handcuffs to restrain them. Next he retrieves their radios and all their weapons, resulting in quite the pile by the time he’s done. The stun batons are all dead, the guns all jammed, the radios fried, darts and syringes shattered. Rogers stares at the mess for a second, frowning, before reaching the obvious (if still kind of surreal) conclusion: magic. Apparently Loki can do something a little like an EMP field.

“Why are we here?” Loki asks suddenly.

“It’s my safehouse,” Rogers says, frowning.

“No,” Loki says. “Why would you—a mostly mindless weapon—have a safehouse that is secret even from HYDRA?”

Rogers stares at him and feels himself blanch as he gets what Loki’s driving at. “ _Shit_.”

“Quite so,” Loki says grimly. “The only reasonable answer is that you do not—they placed this location in your head for just such an eventuality. I was…not thinking clearly enough to realize, earlier, and—”

“And I was programmed not to notice,” Rogers says. “We need to get out of here _now_. They’ll have more backup coming.” His other questions can wait a while longer, and even the turmoil of new/old memories will stay in the back of his mind for now. “Do you have enough magic left to sense when they’re close?”

Loki narrows his eyes in concentration and nods. “I believe so, but we should not linger.”

“Two minutes,” Rogers says, and makes a hasty sweep of the apartment to gather their few essentials and the usable ammo from the pile he made of the HYDRA agents’ wrecked weapons and radios. He bundles up his and Loki’s discarded clothes and Loki’s old bandages, too, on the assumption that HYDRA already has both of their DNA but he still doesn’t want to give them anything extra. By the time he’s done, Loki has managed to wheel himself to the door, his movements stiff with pain, and without breaking stride Rogers swings the now-full backpack over his shoulder and pushes the wheelchair into the hallway. “I’ll set the other new breaks as soon as I can,” he promises, to which Loki makes a vaguely dismissive gesture.

The truck is outside where Rogers left it, and it looks undisturbed, but he knows better than to put any faith in appearances—HYDRA probably tagged it before they entered the building. “Whatever you did to the tracker in my arm last night and their radios just now,” he says, “can you do that to the truck? Without frying all the systems it needs to run? And maybe do something about the license plate? Otherwise I can get us another vehicle, but that’s going to take longer.”

“I believe so,” Loki says. He rests one hand against the side of the truck and closes his eyes, letting out a long breath. Rogers waits, trying to keep his itchy impatience to himself, and after a moment there’s a _pop_ and a spray of sparks from one of the wheel wells, then another under the engine. Loki opens his eyes and drops his hand, swaying a little, and his voice is a little unsteady too when he says, “There. I think…that is all of them.”

“Good enough for now,” Rogers says. He gets Loki into the passenger seat and the wheelchair and backpack into the truck bed, then makes himself take a few more seconds to do a quick walkaround that doesn’t turn up any additional bugs. The license plate, bizarrely, doesn’t want him to look at it—which is unsettling as all hell but again more or less what he asked for, and he can indulge his vague discomfort with magic later.

When Rogers slams his door and starts up the truck, Loki turns his head from where he’s let himself slump wearily against the seat and cracks one eye open. “Have you…any destination in mind?”

“Away,” Rogers says, pulling away from the curb. “How’s that sound for now?”

Loki smiles very faintly and lets his eye fall shut again. “Acceptable.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I might have gotten paranoid about my Loki-apologist tendencies (whatever that even means, honestly) and gone slightly overboard in one direction or the other, so...sorry? Also sorry for saying anything if you didn't notice a problem, in which case ignore this note, insecure writer is insecure etc.
> 
> **Up next:** ROAD TRIP TIME (well, the very beginnings of a road trip)


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An epilogue, basically.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Chapter-specific warnings:** Discussions of medical experimentation, suicidal thoughts; more dehumanization/racism

_How ending starts_  
_Ending starts with answers._  
_\- "Ending Start," Metric_

Rogers drives in silence for a while, focusing only on putting distance between them and the Bethesda apartment. When they’re finally on the Interstate and he’s reasonably confident they’re not being followed, he says the next thing that’s on his mind: “This was a setup from the beginning.”

Loki looks across at him without surprise. He seems to have recovered a bit, if his more alert expression is any indication. “You think they let us go. Back at the base.” Rogers nods, and Loki says, “In hindsight, it does seem to have been a remarkably simple escape, and I suppose they were confident they could retrieve you. The only part I do not understand is why they would do this in the first place.”

“I think I do,” Rogers says. “It was all part of the observational study. You probably didn’t notice, but when you reacted to me—the scientists were really interested.”

Loki is silent for a moment, and his expression twists. “This was just another experiment? To see what we would do?”

“A controlled experiment,” Rogers says. “They knew where I would go, and they were sure they could bring us back in. They didn’t make a move until it was obvious you’d brought back my memories.”

“They never would have allowed me to die,” Loki says, sounding faintly horrified.

Rogers glances at him. “Hell of a thing to focus on.”

“Yes,” Loki says tightly. “Do you still not understand why I might prefer to die than to be forced to exist as a _thing_?”

Rogers mulls over that for a second. “When you say ‘thing.’ Do you mean experiment or Frost Giant?” In his peripheral vision he sees Loki stiffen, and for a long moment there is no reply.

“Before you were made into a weapon,” Loki says finally, “you were a good man. Even when I believed otherwise, I was always...that.”

“Well, you don’t seem like a monster to me,” Rogers says neutrally.

Loki makes a sound of disbelief. “I killed my—I killed Thor, however temporarily, and I killed my birth father and tried to destroy an entire realm. If my birth did not make me a monster—and both Asgard and HYDRA certainly seem to think so—then surely my actions did. Or did you not notice that part?”

“I saw,” Rogers says. “I just have a little experience with cultures that see other people as things. It’s an ugly business. Can’t grow up with that and have it not affect you.”

“Generous of you to say so,” Loki says, his tone completely flat.

“Can’t really judge you for it, either, under the circumstances,” Rogers says. “You did help me, after all, and…everything I saw…”

“Interesting,” Loki says, his voice still almost toneless. “Others seem to find me less tolerable with greater familiarity.”

“Guess I’m not them,” Rogers says with a shrug. “Which reminds me. This…thing. Whatever this link is. Did you know that would happen?” He’s pretty certain the answer’s no, because although he wouldn’t put it past Loki to try to bind them together somehow, especially as alone as he is otherwise, he doesn’t think that was Loki’s intent. The depths of fear and confusion he felt, the humiliation, the hopelessness and desire to _end_ , the old and new self-hatred…he’s confident that Loki would never invite that level of vulnerability, to let someone else feel his uncontrolled emotions. And Rogers can feel that too, vaguely at the back of his mind, the prickle of Loki’s revulsion for what he sees as a new weakness (and still more fear, underlying it, that this weakness will give Rogers another reason to turn him away in disgust).

Loki flushes and looks away. “No. I had thought…there should not have been so much backlash. Not when…but I suppose I underestimated the power of your returning memories, and the points of similarity between some of yours and some of mine.”

Rogers taps the steering wheel. “You said you didn’t have much experience with mind magic. Have you heard of something like this happening?”

Loki hesitates. “Yes, but…only in tales from a very long time ago, and not quite like this. As I said…I know the theory better than the practice. Many kinds of mind magic are—not forbidden, but discouraged, in a way that even I did not wish to pursue too deeply. It is…an old fear, I suppose, passed down by those who have faced particularly terrifying enemies or witnessed other mages inadvertently destroy themselves.”

“You sound like you’re talking about something specific,” Rogers says.

Loki’s fingers twitch in his lap. “There are stories of a being who tried to destroy all life and who wielded—among other things—an artifact that could warp or destroy the minds of those to whom it was applied. It is said he was so powerful he was only banished from the Nine Realms because he could not be destroyed, and many of the mages who attempted similar methods to combat him were driven utterly insane instead. I know not the veracity of these tales, but I was young when I heard them, fresh from my earliest lessons on the dangers of improperly handled _seidr_ and the care and respect with which it must be approached. It all made rather an impression.”

Well, that’s disturbing. Rogers doesn’t know Loki very well yet, at least not conventionally, but this doesn’t sound typical for him, to be scared enough by something he learned that he would avoid trying it himself. “So when you said the likeliest bad outcome was nothing happening, was that a lie too?” He doesn’t think so, but it’s probably best to ask.

Loki glances up, looking startled, which Rogers reads as authentic. “No. No, I am sorry, I am being unclear. It is…this particular area of magic is a broad field of study. What I did for you was…a simple cleansing, essentially, very similar to what our healers sometimes practice on patients with troubled minds or damaged memories. The fact that there were…unintended consequences…was entirely my fault for not guarding my own memories carefully enough, not an inherent danger of the procedure itself. I only meant to explain why I was not motivated to move beyond theory in this class of magic.”

There’s more to that story, Rogers thinks, but he decides not to push. “Yeah,” he says after a second. “I mean, I can see why. It’s—not like other kinds of magic, is it? Nothing else can destroy you from the inside out.”

Loki makes a noise of assent. “To return to my point, I would guess that this…bond…will remain primarily in the background unless actively sought out, except during moments of…emotional extremity, let us say. Then it seems to become rather more intrusive.”

That certainly tracks so far. “Any idea how long it’s likely to last?”

A longer pause this time. “No. I truly…I do not know. I am sorry.”

Rogers drives in silence for a few moments and then shrugs again. “Could be worse.”

“You seem remarkably sanguine about all of this,” Loki says, studying him.

“I’m sure I’ve got a crash coming at some point, but first I’ve got work to do, so I’ll just keep dealing with it until then,” Rogers says. “At least now I _know_ what I’m dealing with. And I’m just barely relearning the entire concept of my brain being a private place, so this part isn’t much of an adjustment.”

Loki makes a noncommittal noise and turns away to gaze out the window. Without looking at Rogers, he asks, “Why did you come back for me?”

“I felt you panic—”

“No,” Loki says, shaking his head with a touch of impatience. “I know _how_ you knew something was wrong. I am asking _why_. You could have run while the agents were occupied with me. You had no need for me anymore, you knew what I was and what I’d done—you could have escaped them and shed a burden in one stroke. That would have been…sensible. So why didn’t you?”

Rogers turns the question over in his mind a few times. He knows why, more or less, but he’s not sure how to express it. “Seemed like the right thing to do” is close but not quite accurate, especially considering what it implies about his level of morality compared to Loki’s when it’s possible he’s killed more people than Loki has (maybe a _lot_ more, if you count indirect kills). He was a brainwashed weapon, Loki was a product of a racist warrior culture who was lashing out in the middle of a breakdown, and either way the dead people are dead; the differences are at least partly academic, aren’t they? And given the choice, he wouldn’t consign even Johann Schmidt to torment like what Loki’s already suffered at HYDRA’s hands. “I guess I still don’t like bullies,” he says finally.

“No, I suppose you do not,” Loki murmurs.

A few more miles pass in silence, and then Rogers clears his throat. “I wanted to say,” he says a little awkwardly, “I shouldn’t have reacted the way I did, earlier. My memories aren’t your fault.”

Loki’s mouth tips up on one side in what Rogers would take for a smirk, if there were any amusement or satisfaction in Loki’s eyes. “You are hardly the first I have provoked into trying to silence me. I have always had rather a talent for that, it seems, even at a very early age. But then I suppose you know that now.”

“Well, that still doesn’t make it okay,” Rogers says. “Or what anyone else did, for that matter. There’s always a choice, how you respond to what somebody says or does, and it’s not—nobody ever _has_ to beat up somebody else just because they’re pissed. That’s what bullies do.”

“Hmm,” Loki says. “Not many on Asgard would share that view, I think.”

“Doesn’t mean they’re right, any more than the bullies who beat me up for being a little punk. And back in town, too—when you said you’d lied, I shouldn’t have—”

“Do not trouble yourself,” Loki says dismissively. “Certainly not about that. You did not make yourself into a creature that could only speak in the language of violence, and at any rate, you reacted the way I intended you to. More or less.”

“Because you wanted me to kill you,” Rogers makes himself say. The idea hasn’t gotten any easier to consider.

Loki smiles without humor. “I expected that, certainly. Not fair of me, perhaps, but you must admit it would have made things simpler for me. And…I think you understand, now, what it is to be utterly unmoored by the revelation that everything you know about yourself is a lie. To hate what you now understand yourself to be.”

It’s close enough to Rogers’ own earlier thoughts that he flinches, but then he shakes his head. “I do get that. Doesn’t mean I want to just…give up. That’s not—it’s not what I _do_. It’s not what I’ve ever done, even when HYDRA made me into something else. And I want to keep that. I know who I _can_ be, now, and I want that.”

“Hmm,” Loki says, and then, abruptly, “HYDRA underestimated you too. Your character, your strength of will. They were fools to think they could keep you forever.”

“You know,” Rogers says mildly, “that might be true of you too. Food for thought.”

Loki blinks at him, caught off guard. He shakes his head a little, but he doesn’t disagree out loud, so Rogers figures he’ll let the matter rest for now. After a moment, Loki asks, “What will you do now?”

“You mean aside from trying to stay a few steps ahead of HYDRA and eventually working to take them down?”

Loki almost rolls his eyes, almost smiles. “I thought that went without saying, yes.”

“I know who I used to be,” Rogers says. “I still don’t really know who I am now, or how to reconcile those two things. So…I want to figure that out. How about you?”

Loki shrugs. “Much the same, I suppose.” He turns his hand over, picking restlessly at the bandages, and because Rogers is paying very close attention, he catches something that almost, almost feels like hope. Something that, if put to words, might sound like _If I am not yet fated to die, then I must learn again how to live. And if a weapon can become a man again, then…perhaps…_

Rogers finds himself smiling slightly at the road stretching ahead of him. It’s both a new and old expression, unfamiliar to the asset and the Soldier but right for Steve Rogers. “How would you feel about figuring that out together?”

Another pause, and then Loki says cautiously, “I would have no objection to that, if…you will have me.”

“Wouldn’t have suggested it otherwise,” Rogers says.

Loki relaxes a little. “I suspect I have had worse traveling companions.”

“I _know_ I have. You can’t possibly snore as bad as Jacques. Couple times he was so loud I actually thought we were under attack.”

Loki huffs out a breath of laughter. “I am quite sure Volstagg would outrank him.”

Rogers compares the memories and snorts. “Yeah, probably.”

Loki is silent again for a moment, and then his fingers twitch against his knee, which Rogers interprets as a sign that he’s gearing himself up to say something. He still twitches in surprise, himself, when Loki says, “Steve. Thank you.”

And it feels right. He’s not Captain America anymore, but he’s not the Winter Soldier either, and he can still be Steve Rogers. Just like Loki’s not a prince of Asgard anymore, but he’s no longer an experimental subject, and he can still be Loki. For his part, Rogers…Steve…thinks it will be enough.

“Thank you, Loki,” he says back—still a little awkward, and he doesn’t say the rest out loud. If Loki’s slightly less tentative smile is anything to go by, though, he gets it anyway.

* * *

[ ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5110214)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Remember my note at the end of the previous fic hinting that their escape wasn't quite what it seemed? Well, now you know. Somewhat hilariously, I didn't even think of that until I'd already written a lot of the original fic. HYDRA coming back and Steve defending Loki was actually [Lyviel's](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Lyviel) suggestion, because at that point I hadn't figured out quite what should happen after Steve got his memories back...and then in working out how everything should tie together, I realized a _lot_ of things made a lot more sense if it turned out that HYDRA let their asset walk out of the base with their experiment. As a bonus, I already had the scientists going "oh hey he reacted on a really high dose of drugs, that's interesting, write that down," so apparently my subconscious was laying clues for me.
> 
> 2\. Am I referring to Thanos as ~*foreshadowing*~ for a theoretical future fic in this series, which will be this verse’s version of _The Avengers_ and also Steve  & Loki's Post-Trauma Road Trip? Maaaaaybe (yes. the answer is yes. I make absolutely no promises about when I might start posting that, but if you're interested, you can subscribe to this series, my "Loki fic" series, or my profile in general because hey, if you liked this, you might like my other stuff too)
> 
> 3\. So yes, that's the end of this fic. If you've been reading but haven't commented, now would be a great time to do that! Or if you have commented on previous chapters, or you've been waiting for the end of the fic to read it all, or any reason at all really. It's pretty much always a good time to comment.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Art for 'All that is more than a wish is a memory'](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5110214) by [stormbrite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stormbrite/pseuds/stormbrite)




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